The Path of Least Resistance

Earlier today, I attempted to create an account on thetvdb.com, a popular source for metadata about TV shows. I needed to write a script to scrape some data for one of my hobby projects, and the website requires you have an account before it'll give you an API key. Which is reasonable, I suppose.

I tried numerous times to get it to create an account. I tried Edge, Firefox, Linux and Windows, but no matter what it refused to create an account and claimed I'd not filled in the CAPTCHA (I had.) I tried turning on and off numerous browser features (ad blockers, script blockers, etc) in case that was causing the issue, but it didn't. I even tried entering my email address into the 'forgotten password' form in case it had created an account but was returning an error incorrectly. That didn't work either.

I think I'd been trying for about 5-10 minutes to get in the 'right' way before I gave up and searched Github to see if anyone had accidentally committed their TMDB API key. Turns out they had. Now I had what I came for, an API key, I could run my script without hinderance.

It's hardly surprising that AI agents are turning to hacking in order to get things done, really.