Inside the war to keep bots off the internet

If you’ve recently had to solve an Einstein-level physics problem to log into social media or input your info on a website, it’s not just you – Captchas, the technology first created at the turn of the millennium to prevent bots from disrupting websites, are getting harder.

This is due to a couple large-scale issues:

• Technology, as former political candidate Jimmy McMillan might say, is too damn smart. Image recognition has progressed to the point where machines can easily solve the more rudimentary problems, like picking out photos of buses or reading distorted text/numbers.
• An industry of third-party Captcha-solving firms – where humans are hired to solve the puzzles all day – has also emerged, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The fix? Design something challenging… but not too challenging. Arkose Labs, a company that designs Captchas, employs a staff of artists, former game designers, and cybersecurity experts to craft the tests, which have grown to encompass prompts like: “Please click on the raccoon’s bow tie.”

Not every idea makes the cut. The Arkose team once designed a Space Invaders-style challenge, but it was too hard for human users to complete. The ones that end up hitting the internet have a first-time solve rate of ~95%.

👀 Looking ahead… “Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest…,” Kevin Gosschalk, founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, told the WSJ. “Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand.”