Proving my humanity - or who is technology serving?

I am tired of proving I'm human.

One of the promises of technology adoption is making things easier and removing friction. Increasingly though - I've noticed how things are harder and taking more time because of technology. This makes me ask: who is this technology actually serving?

The case that comes to mind is an obstacle I encounter multiple times a day - proving I'm a human to the institutional repository platform we use to publish our reports and preprints. Back in May the whole platform went down for a bit and then came back with intermittent outages. The cause for the instability? Most likely bots swarming the platform to scrape content to train LLMs. So now the platform is back up - and stable - but before anybody can access anything on the platform (like this chapter I wrote about research metrics) you are greeted with the message "Let's confirm you are human" along with an image identification exercise to prove you are human. (Disclosure: sometimes I fail the test because I am hasty or the images are too vague.) I encounter this prompt at least once a day and have grown to resent it. Thanks to bots sent out to scrape the internet to feed LLMs in support of the ballooning AI bubble, humans have to jump through hoops to read PDFs. I wouldn't be so salty about it if the LLMs were useful or actually helpful - but I don't think that's their point.

Every time I have to prove my humanity it's hard not to ponder - who is being served by any of this? I am old enough to remember when democratized information was exciting and a promise of great potential. "Information wants to be free!" we declared. This is something I truly believe. But the free information has been commodified and sold back to us under various platforms. IP and copyright theft is not fair use. So now the walls are coming back in ways because the internet has become unusable for humans.

Why do we put information online? Is it for other humans to read, reflect, and use? Or is it content for tech companies to transform, distort, and sell back to us? And are these technologies that people actually want or need? Increasingly (and I might be an old person shouting a cloud for this), I feel like everything is just in service of a vague promise of AI transforming society for the better, but it really seems like extraction in service of capital.

So I hate this friction because while it reminds me I am human, it also reminds me that the internet isn't really for humans right now. It's bots all the way down and it's pretty depressing.