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Bot or Not

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Recently I was nearly defeated by a restaurant mobile website. I somehow managed to fail a THIRD visual CAPTCHA puzzle asking me to identify something in a blurry image grid before I could order a burrito.

The next day, I chuckled at a news story describing a ChatGPT Agent that casually and successfully passed CAPTCHA as it narrated:

“Now I’ll click the ‘verify you are human’ checkbox to complete the verification on Cloudflare. This step is necessary to prove I’m not a bot and proceed with the action.”

I had a harder time proving that I was a human than the ChatGPT Agent did.

The CAPTCHA arms race has been accelerating for years. First invented in 1997, CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” At this point, AI is far better than humans at these tests.

Josh Dzieza once noted in The Verge:

“The problem with many of these tests isn’t necessarily that bots are too clever — it’s that humans suck at them. And it’s not that humans are dumb; it’s that humans are wildly diverse in language, culture, and experience.”

Security hurdles are inconvenient but necessary. Cybersecurity company Imperva reported that 51% of all 2024’s internet activity was bot-based.

And yet any friction in customer experience carries a cost. Statista reported the 2024 global online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70%, with “complex checkout” cited as a major factor.

Agentic AI promises to bypass some of this friction, but it will be interesting to see how customer experience evolves.

And it’s more than a little ironic that the future may require bots to help navigate running a gauntlet designed to prove that we’re not bots.

Highlight from the Road

I’ve been traveling a bit for speaking the last few weeks — Opticon NYC, MoEngage Customer Engagement Summit, and Opticon London. So fun to meet so many of you on the road!

I wanted to share one of my favorite moments. My older daughter is a recent college grad newly working in marketing, so was able to join me in the audience of my talk at Javits Center for Opticon NYC.

I surprised her with this old photo from a sampling event when I roped in my family to help launch method in the UK.

Next up, Opticon Online on October 21. I’m speaking at a few private business conferences in November and then will be at BAM Marketing Congress in Brussels on Dec 4.

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit.

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2022 about the limits of last-click attribution. And here’s where you can read and search all 23 years of these cartoons.

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.