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- Captcha tests have been around for years, but they're getting more difficult.
- Experts say the "I'm not a robot" tests should evolve to keep up with advancing tech.
- But some internet users are sick of trying to prove their humanity.
The days of simply identifying distorted letters and typing them out to verify your humanity are long gone.
Google's reCAPTCHA and other third-party captchas feel more like a New York Times game nowadays. But instead of bragging to friends about solving it in two minutes, the reward is being able to pay your utilities bill or log into an account you haven't accessed in months.
The prompts ask us to identify pictures of motorcycles, crosswalks, or buses. Still, they're getting less simple in order to stay ahead of technology that knows how to outsmart Captchas, the Wall Street Journal reported. To put it another way: the robots are making it harder to prove you're not a robot.
So, if you're annoyed by new complex captchas, prepare for them to get more mentally taxing.
"Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that's nonsensical," Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, a web-security firm that designs captchas, told the Journal.
He added: "Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand."
The acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Some humans struggle more than others to pass such tests.
There's already a corner of the internet complaining about them.
"I keep falling into endless loops of non-stop 'prove you're human' tests. As in 12+ times I'm absolutely certain I know what a bloody car, bus or crosswalk looks like but they just keep coming," one Reddit user complained in a query about bypassing such tests.
"Can't wait to be violently humbled by one of those goddamn captcha things telling me I'm too dumb to tell a bus from a bike again tonight," an X user posted ahead of a Taylor Swift merchandise release.