Before I Am Asked Again: On Passing as Human In Digital Systems

Interacting with digital systems today increasingly involves being required to demonstrate that one is human. While such requirements are often framed as technical solutions to problems of security and verification, they also raise broader questions about how humanness is defined, operationalized, and recognized within contemporary digital environments. Rather than attempting to define what a human is, this paper explores how humanness is produced, recognized, and negotiated in relation to digital systems. The analysis builds on a situated vignette and a dialogical exchange between four researchers who read and discussed Karin Hansson’s 2022 essay “I’m not a robot”. Hansson’s text reflects the discussion about AI years ago, and is based on an investigation of how “humanity” is extracted in various digital systems, commodifying human expressions, relationships, and cognition. In addition, the paper draws on a brief, situated account from a workplace interaction involving AI-mediated communication, used as an analytical fragment to further explore how recognition as human unfolds in practice. The conversation serves as a generative space for exploring how different conceptualizations of the human emerge across domains such as work, education, and digital communication. The aim is not to resolve the question of the human as such, but to problematize how it is continuously reconfigured within sociotechnical contexts. Rather than treating the human as a predefined category, this paper shows how humanness is continuously produced through systems of human recognition that define what can be seen, measured, and accepted as human.