I tried the Sam Altman-backed orb face scanner. It couldn’t verify my humanity

A Sam Altman-backed company has an ambitious, but controversial, plan to solve one of the internet’s trickiest problems – distinguishing humans from artificial bots — and it relies on a gleaming, science fiction-looking orb.

A Sam Altman-backed company has an ambitious plan to solve one of the internet’s trickiest problems — distinguishing humans from artificial bots. It involves an Orb. The Orb couldn’t verify me as a “unique human” when I tried it — but it turns out, that’s partially by design. I wear blue-light blocking contacts with a slight yellow tint, so the Orb evidently thought I was trying to fool it by disguising my identity. “Well, that’s sad, but I’m grateful that it rejected you,” Tiago Sada, chief product officer at the company behind the Orb, told me after the tool returned a message saying, “something is blocking your face.” The Orb, built by Tools for Humanity, which Altman co-founded, wants to provide what it says is a more effective identity verification method in the age of artificial intelligence.