In the age of AI, captchas are mostly a burden to humans
Captchas were invented in the early 2000s to tackle an issue on the Internet: bots. Bots were used to quickly snag up auctions on eBay, tickets for a concert or sports event, or to take snapshots of websites faster than any human.
The idea was simple: display a basic puzzle to the user to make sure that a human is performing the action and not a bot. This worked fine in the beginning for the most part. Bots were not powerful enough to solve captures quickly or at all at the time.
Captchas evolved, Google acquired the technology a decade ago and evolved it further. Soon, you'd get the dreaded "I'm not a robot" checkboxes and eventually no checkboxes to prove that you were human.
Services like Cloudflare introduced hCaptcha and other solutions to block bots and allow human visitors.
Rise of AI makes captchas a burden, but only for humans
Systems were invented to bypass captchas, but the rise of AI has made captchas a burden to humans only. According to a 2023 research paper, researchers were able to defeat 70% of captchas in 2016 already.
Extensions like Buster or Privacy Pass promised to improve the handling of captchas. Buster claimed that it could be used to solve any captcha and Privacy Pass was designed by Cloudflare to reduce the number of captchas the service displayed to visitors.
to help solve any captchas, to make the process less cumbersome for humans.
Today, researchers claim that AI is capable of solving anything thrown at them at a fraction of the time it takes humans to solve them, according to a report by The Conversation.
While you are still pondering whether you have overlooked a car or traffic light while solving a captcha, bots have most likely solved it in milliseconds only to perform whatever action they have programmed to do. So, that ticket for the concert may be long gone, even if you are among the first to start the checkout.
Tools like Google Vision or OpenAI's Clip are better at recognising objects than humans will ever be. The same is true for deciphering letters, numbers, and symbols in captchas. Even the latest iteration of Google's captcha technology, which does not require any puzzle solving at all, has been conquered already.
This particular technology observes the behavior of the user on the website. Does the visitor behave like a human? With AI becoming more powerful, systems can easily mimic human behavior on websites to pass these tests.
Other forms of captchas exist. Some ask users to move a puzzle piece somewhere, or position an animal so that it aligns with something displayed as well. These have been conquered already by AI systems.
In Closing
Ever since captchas were invented, there was a heated debate whether they do more harm than good. Nowadays, with bots easily solving anything thrown at them, captchas are only capable of blocking older bots and, of course, humans, from accessing a site or service.
So, would it be better to get rid of all captchas? It would certainly be beneficial to the millions of Internet users who regularly bite in their keyboards out of frustration when a captcha cannot be solved quickly.
What is your take on all of this? Do you encounter captchas regularly? Have you problem solving them, sometimes? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
Rarely run into a captcha; there was one the other day on a site that was unbelievably cumbersome. I had no idea what I was supposed to solve. It may have been PayPal. I continued clicking for a few tries, and eventually the captcha disappeared. Don’t know, but I don’t use Google search.
This is particularly bad on my Android phone.
For some reason I can’t use Google search because it thinks I’m a robot.
It is a stream of never ending captchas.
So now I use Bing search.
I use the Firefox browser with the uBlock extension. I do the searches in a private tab.
Brave Search and Yandex are better. Brave shows more relevant search results while Yandex shows more uncensored results in regards to topics witch Western-based search engines would censor and show propaganda lies instead.
Didn’t know that Brave used his own index, thanks. Yandex is indeed handy to have a completely different search result!
@Allwynd
Putin called, said thanks for the promo.
@45 RPM
You only get to choose which propaganda you consume.
I see them daily and the most annoying part of the ‘captcha’ is I have to allow google to run scripts which I prefer not to do.
There are other alleged bot blockers that are worse. I can’t even get on the Walmart website any more so I spend my money elsewhere instead.
None of them are actually trying to keep bots off the sites, they are trying to force users to allow tracking cookies on thier systems.
I despise captchas and always have. I can’t even visit the Amazon homepage now without getting an idiotic captcha – just because I use Brave and presumably Amazon don’t like the privacy settings. Needless to say, I do not bother to fill in the captcha.
I quit without return any site requiring the bother of answering to Google captcha for three reasons :
1- Avoiding Google and whatever 1st or 3-rd party connections to their servers, which are blocked system-wide with very few exceptions.
2- Providing another tracking feature to Google.
3- Time.
I do accept Cloudflare captcha which only requires a click on the confirmation that the user is not a bot.
Nevertheless often some parameters are added to the URL, which may be corrected with a userScript such as ‘Clean Cloudflare URL’ (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/425855-clean-cloudflare-url).
Generally speaking I never loose my time and nerves with any captcha trying to play it smart : I just pass my way.
Stopped using google because it threw-up so many captchs that I just gave up.
So what’s google and silicon valley gonna do when humans walk away from their search engines
with their wallets in tow?
Maybe I’ll use AI to do my bidding for me for me: perplexity.ai
Honestly, I think Google has become useless to many people. Haven’t used my gmail account since 2011. As for its other products, even earlier.
I curse them and whoever invented them