In 1993, The New Yorker published what eventually would become one of the most famous cartoons in the magazine’s history. Two dogs sit in front of a computer, and one quips to the other: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The joke, courtesy of American cartoonist Peter Steiner, was a neat encapsulation of the internet’s early promise: a world where identity was fluid, anonymity was freedom, and, most importantly, no one was checking your papers at the door.
But that punchline doesn’t land quite the same way today. If the early internet was a masquerade, the modern one is a security checkpoint, demanding proof of identity at every turn. The dream of digital reinvention has been replaced by a web of logins, biometrics and behavioural tracking; where who (or what) you are is always under suspicion. This makes Dutch filmmaker Victoria Warmerdam’s Oscar-nominated short film I’m Not a Robot (2023) feel less like a punchline and more like an inevitability. Thanks to CAPTCHAs, algorithms and AI gatekeepers, the internet not only knows you’re not a dog — it might also decide you’re not human either.
The film tells the story of Lara, a music producer who discovers this the hard way when she suddenly starts failing CAPTCHA tests, those ubiquitous little trials that force you to prove you are flesh and blood by identifying blurry traffic lights or clicking on crosswalks. What begins as a minor annoyance escalates into something more existential: what, after all, is it that makes us human? And, more disturbingly, do we really have control over that?
With just four short films in her curriculum, Warmerdam has already crafted an impressive body of work, exploring recurring themes with a unique mix of sharp satire and poignant melancholy. Her films frequently explore identity issues while also providing provocative and amusing commentary on our perceptions of others and ourselves.
If identity is a performance, then Warmerdam is most interested in the moments when the mask slips. Or worse, when someone else decides what role you’re playing. Her 2019 short film, Short Calf Muscle — which screened at over 150 festivals and earned widespread acclaim — followed a young man who discovers the world perceives him as a… gnome. It was an absurd, biting take on the disconnect between self-perception and societal labels; one that made it clear how easily identity can be assigned rather than chosen. In I’m Not a Robot, Warmerdam shifts her focus to the increasingly transactional nature of identity in the digital age, a theme that feels strikingly relevant in a time dominated by bots, verifications and carefully curated online personas.
After failing so many human verifications, Lara is forwarded to an online test to certify she is not, de facto, a robot. One question reads: “Other people think I’m cold”. Without hesitation, she leans over to a colleague in front of her for reassuring confirmation: “Do you think I’m a cold person?”
The filmmaker extends this question beyond the digital sphere, taking a sharp jab at how identity is assigned and validated in broader society. Another particularly biting moment unfolds moments later in this same all-women office when a job interview veers into the absurd. The interviewer, with the well-meaning confidence of corporate inclusivity, justifies: “We did hire a man once, but it felt forced. He probably felt like he was just here for the ‘diversity.’” The irony lands with a delayed sting, exposing the hollow rituals of modern identity politics, where belonging is often dictated by social optics rather than genuine inclusion. It is also a poignant, satirical reminder that our fixation on identity can often reduce people to labels, stripping away the messy, authentic complexity of what it means to be human.
But while the film satirises these external forces, it never loses sight of the individual. Whether through online verification methods or workplace politics, Lara’s journey exposes a bigger concern: how much control do we truly have over who we are?
The discomforting answer begins to take shape as the film moves beyond satire and into something far more unnerving. It inhabits that unsettling space of modern dystopian narratives, where the nightmare isn’t some distant future anymore, it’s (almost) already here, getting into the fabric of everyday life. This is territory Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror (2011-) has mastered, and I’m Not a Robot shares its DNA.
In the film’s peak moment, Lara’s boyfriend reveals the truth: she isn’t failing CAPTCHAs because the system is flawed. She’s failing because she was never meant to pass. She is, in fact, a synthetic partner, purchased to replace his late girlfriend. This pivots the film from a critique of bureaucratic absurdity to a much bleaker exploration of autonomy. If she never knew she was artificial, was her love, her grief, her self-awareness any less real? And if she was programmed to believe she had free will, how different is that from the illusions the rest of us live under?
Lara’s existential crisis unfolds to a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” (1992) — because what better soundtrack for discovering you’re not special but a replica? The revelation hits like a cybernetic gut punch, and brings to mind, once again, an old episode of Black Mirror from the second season titled Be Right Back where a grieving woman resurrects her deceased lover through an AI replica. Both stories dissect the commodification of identity and grief in a world where technology blurs the line between human and machine. But while Be Right Back leans into melancholic horror, I’m Not a Robot embraces satire. Lara doesn’t collapse into despair, she short-circuits, her existence unravelling in a moment of biting, cosmic irony.
Warmerdam sharpens this irony by shooting on film, an analogue format in an era obsessed with digital authentication. It’s a small but deliciously petty rebellion, reinforcing the film’s central question: if the machines can’t detect your humanity, does that mean you’ve lost it, or that they never understood it in the first place? In the end, I’m Not a Robot is a razor-sharp takedown of our era’s obsession with validation while raising disconcerting questions about how much of our humanity can be artificially recreated. The early internet may have allowed us to slip into new selves, but today’s automated systems demand that we prove, over and over, that we are who we say we are. The question is no longer whether anyone knows you’re a dog. It’s whether, after enough CAPTCHA failures, you start wondering if you ever were one at all.
Wellington Almeida is a programmer, a film writer and a devoted cat lover.