Why CAPTCHAs Are Getting So Hard

Morning robots!

Remember the simpler days?

Ahh.

Type the nice little word you see in the picture.

Easy.

But today we have to muster up the courage to click this box:

Which then asks us to type two simple words:

And when you inevitably mess that up, you’re prompted with this:

…

Why did proving you’re not a robot get soooo hard?!

The year was 2000.

The dude was Luis Von Ahn:

Little Luis was sitting in at a talk for Yahoo where some big wig Yahoo executive was going on and on about an email spam problem they had:

So Luis comes up with this:

An ~optical character recognition test~

Aka reading words inside pictures lol.

This is brilliant because the dumbest human could pass

But the smartest computer could never…

Luis calls this invention CAPTCHA.

Little bit of a problem though…

When this thing starts testing millions of humans each day on Yahoo, our answers to the picture puzzle were training computers to be…

…smarter than us!

So Luis has to get smarter.

He rolls out reCaptcha v2…

You know the one with the images of bikes and traffic lights and stuff:

Andddd computers got better than us at that too…

So in this game of human vs. bot cat & mouse, computers have become indistinguishable from humans online.

Which is why this Sam Altman company called World…

…is reinventing Luis’ CAPTCHA.

So instead of picture puzzles computers can learn, they’re using something computers will never have…

An eyeball!

You download their app:

Walk your unique code over to their orb:

Take a cute photo of your eyes

And boom!

They basically give you a blue checkmark online that says, ‘hey, I’m a real human. I verified it in person!’

It’s AI-proof baby ✨

Stay Cute,
Henry & Dylan

P.S.

You can learn more about what World’s up to HERE 🌈