It’s surely time to update Peter Steiner’s famous New Yorker cartoon about the internet first published in July 1993. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” says a dog sitting at a desk, paw resting on a computer keyboard, to a canine friend below.
That cartoon, which highlighted the transgressive anonymity of the emerging internet, has become the most reproduced in the magazine’s history, resurfacing in books, mugs and T-shirts, and even inspiring a play. The original was sold for $175,000 at auction in 2023.
But nowadays, thanks to the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, Steiner would have to swap his animate dog for an inanimate bot — a far trickier visual challenge. On the internet, it has become almost impossible to know whether you are interacting with a real human or a synthetic one powered by an AI-enabled chatbot, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. We increasingly live in an online world in which no one knows you’re a bot.