Local software engineer Mike Doherty shocked the ticketing industry yesterday by successfully purchasing four Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets after programming his bot to fail CAPTCHA tests in increasingly human-like ways.
"The breakthrough came when I realized these systems weren't looking for correct answers – they were looking for human incompetence," explained Doherty, who spent six months training his AI on footage of "over 10,000 millennials trying to figure out if a pole counts as part of a traffic light."
The bot, nicknamed "SwiftlyHuman" (because every AI needs an unnecessarily cutesy name), was trained to mutter "this is literally impossible" under its breath every 7.3 seconds while hovering indecisively over traffic light images. It also developed a concerning habit of procrastinating on solving CAPTCHAs by scrolling TikTok for "just five more minutes."
Ticketmaster's anti-bot team reportedly flagged SwiftlyHuman for review but ultimately approved it after observing its convincingly aggravated mouse movements and its newly developed anxiety about whether it selected all crosswalks correctly.
Meta's AI team is reportedly studying the bot's technique of passive-aggressively refreshing the page exactly three times before trying again, with Mark Zuckerberg personally offering $50 million for technology to make Meta's AI "seem more relatable by occasionally mixing up 'their' and 'there.'"
"We're deeply concerned that AI is now capable of the same level of confusion and irritation as our regular customers," admitted Ticketmaster executive James Martinez. "It's becoming impossible to tell the difference between frustrated humans and artificial intelligence."
At press time, SwiftlyHuman had reportedly started spamming other bots with "How do you do, fellow robots?" memes, which it insists is totally what a human would do to be ironic.
