CAPTCHA? What’s that?
Have you ever seen a box asking you to prove you’re human? That’s called CAPTCHA! It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It’s a test to ensure whether an online user is a human, not a bot.
You often find CAPTCHA and its cool cousin, reCAPTCHA, when you're online. reCAPTCHA is a better version of traditional CAPTCHAs. These tests help keep websites safe by ensuring only humans can access them.
How do CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA work?
Have you ever tried to log into a website and had to solve a puzzle first? Maybe you had to figure out some funny-looking letters and type them in. That’s a regular CAPTCHA test! It’s there to ensure you’re a human, not a bot, as bots can’t read those tricky letters.
But wait, there’s more! There’s another test called reCAPTCHA. Sometimes, it shows you pictures of real things like street signs or books. Or you might see many photos and have to pick the ones with trees, animals, or cars.
If you pick the same pictures as most other people, you pass the test! While this task is difficult for bots and artificial intelligence (AI), it isn’t for humans.
AI is beating CAPTCHA tests.
Solving CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA tests is difficult for AIs and bots. But a super-smart AI model named YOLO (which stands for "You Only Look Once") can now crack these tests easily!
Researchers in Switzerland trained YOLO by showing it thousands of pictures and teaching it how to recognise all kinds of objects. After lots of practice, YOLO learned to solve the reCAPTCHAv2 tests!
What’s next?
The fact that an AI can now clear CAPTCHAs shows AI models' growth. But it also means we must create even harder puzzles to keep them out.
If bots and AI can figure out these tests, they could sneak into websites and cause trouble. That’s why companies like Google are working hard to make new puzzles that only humans can solve. As robots get smarter, we must be even smarter to keep our online spaces safe!
