I'm struggling with "I’m not a robot" tests...

I am not a robot. Or am I?

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The faint glow of my MacBook screen strains my tired eyes as I try to process the density of those “I am not a robot” tests with my rapidly deteriorating brain. These verification methods look simple and just absolutely are not. Bicycles tucked away on roof racks, cars parked behind walls, the corner of a traffic light barely nudges itself onto a separate tile. There is a special sense of decompression that you get when you’ve been staring at something very intense, very intensely, and then abruptly are called back into normal waking life. For me, that meant 20 minutes of locking in on the astonishing image of a boat somehow stuck in a tree, deliberating over whether to click on it, and then walking over to the corner store two blocks away to fetch my girlfriend an ice cream sandwich.

It’s often difficult for me to move through many socially produced and reproduced abstractions, mostly because my sense of adulthood is a degraded imitation of a more well-adjusted person. But it is a startling moment of clarity to sit alone in my room during a pre-bedtime session and I’m fumbling to impulse-purchase a limited-edition vinyl and I’ve failed the “I’m not a robot test” so many times that I have to stop and wonder how I can be so vastly stupid, vastly clumsy, completely deluded into buying the specious belief that I am a competent human, and I outright know this isn’t true even if this delusion gets hung up in front of actual reality.

Fuck, maybe I am a robot. Maybe this is how robots realize they’re robots, when they can’t recognize whether a traffic light consists of the actual box of lights or if it also includes the metal post that holds it up.

As a relatively successful copywriter, this existential crisis feels devastating, as my arch nemesis is ChatGPT, a glorified English-to-HR translator. Of course, I don’t want to compare my consciousness and general discernment to a program of computer elves that can reword an uploaded email until it isn’t written in a way that makes it seem like you secretly think Trump makes some good points. But this mental stemwinder runs throughout the bigger argument, which resolves to the idea that we may be all a little robotic, trapped in different algorithms, programmed to think and speak and respond according to our own installed cognitive biases, trapped in the assembly line of daily routines and 9-to-5s, a collection of cogs that make up a single cog in the capitalistic machine.

Anyways, I haven’t been able to spot 10 traffic lights in a row. I’m either a robot or a cyclist.

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