Have you seen the changes to Captchas?
As AI bots get better at answering the “I am not a robot” challenge, they’re getting harder and weirder.
People have therefore become aware of the peculiar riddles creators are presenting to test the limits of AI capabilities.
Comedian Jack Whitehall even posed the question, “Is it just me, or have those “I am not a robot” tests started getting harder?” in his most recent Netflix show.
Users are now required to click on non-aquatic animals, move a pointed hand in the same direction as an object, and choose alternatives that have the same form in the latest iteration of the Captcha test.
Captcha – an acronym for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart’ – was created in 2000 to prevent bots from attacking networks and websites.
They have been used for more than two decades as a way to block automated systems like bots from performing certain actions on a website, which limits spam and stops non-human users from accessing specific resources or web pages.
However, researchers at the University of California Irvine found that bots could consistently answer Captchas’ distorted text with almost 100% accuracy.
One day… I might not be smart enough to pass this "I am not a robot" test. pic.twitter.com/hyR9cePQaz
— Susan the dice tree (@feltanimalworld) April 23, 2024
The study authors wrote: ‘Advances in computer vision and machine learning have dramatically increased the ability of bots to recognise distorted texts and by 2019, automated tools achieved over 99% accuracy.
‘Alternatively, bots often outsource solving to Captcha farms – sweatshop-like operations where humans are paid to solve Captchas.
‘In light of this, Captchas have changed and evolved significantly over the years.’
Despite the puzzles being created to stop the bots, the fact bots can solve more Captchas and their ever-increasing level of difficulty could mean the difference between getting tickets to a show or standing outside the concert hall, looking for a scalper.
WTF!? @RoyalMailHelp your Captchas are getting so complicate not even humans can figure them out! pic.twitter.com/gLIVvIzhWk
— 📻 Pete 📻 🇺🇦 (@Mi0VAX) April 24, 2024
‘Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something nonsensical,’ Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, a web security firm that designs captchas, told The Wall Street Journal.
‘Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand,’ he added.
And things have been getting weirder.
One person took to X to ask for help as they’re becoming a bit more complicated: ‘WTF!? @RoyalMailHelp your Captchas are getting so complicated not even humans can figure them out!
Another person took to X to complain about the qualities of the Captchas, saying: ‘ It hurts my brain to look at something that looks realistic but incorrect.’
I hate AI art so much. We can't escape it. This was literally the captcha test I was given today for Epic Games Launcher. It hurts my brain to look at something that looks realistic but incorrect. And participating with this test only helps the AI learn. pic.twitter.com/Mr2jnyxgz5
— Mustafa Al-Hassani (@MustafaSabrPath) December 15, 2022
A third person wrote: ‘One day… I might not be smart enough to pass this “I am not a robot” test.’
