You’re not dreaming: Those ‘I’m not a robot’ Captcha tests are getting harder

If those bothersome Captcha prompts online seem to be getting harder, it’s because they are.

The pesky puzzles are used to ward off bots that crash sites or jeopardize security but now are becoming increasingly more difficult for even the average human to decipher as the technology of malicious actors evolves.

An acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” Captcha prompts traditionally show a scramble of letters or numbers for the user to regurgitate, or a bevy of images which, upon viewing, are supposed to be grouped by those that feature motorcycles, bridges, crosswalks or other fixtures.

But, according to The Wall Street Journal, the anti-bot puzzles are getting more weird and difficult, asking humans to identify objects that are the same shape, click on the only non-aquatic animal or select “the red object in front of the object that appears once.” 

“Is it just me, or have those ‘I am not a robot’ tests started getting harder?” British comic Jack Whitehall quipped in his latest Netflix special “Settle Down.” He lamented his inability to correctly identify stoplights, joking he’s “either a robot or a cyclist.”

He added: “Has anyone had that moment recently where you have failed the I-am-not-a-robot test so many times that you have that moment where you stop and go … Maybe I am a robot?”

“I was trying to log in and it gave me this insane-looking fruit, like a [bowl of] fruit that would be sitting on a table, but it’s growing off a tree,” game developer Mustafa Al-Hassani, 38, told The Journal, detailing a recent prompt asking to choose the “image containing an apple on a tree.”

“It looked realistic, but also so wrong — it was, like, hurting my brain,” the Houston resident added.

Bots attempt to mimic humans, but they’re evolving to be faster and better at outsmarting the barriers to entry online — so Captcha creators are crafting ridiculously difficult prompts to keep automated hackers, spammers and site crashers at bay.

“Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that’s nonsensical,” Arkose Labs CEO and founder Kevin Gosschalk told The Journal. “Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand.”

Entire companies devoted to Captcha solving have emerged, as has rapidly evolving tech that can easily solve prompts that asks humans to decipher warped letters or identify the same object in a set of images, according to The Journal.

Hence, the need for more complex and immersive Captcha prompts, like sliding a puzzle piece or reorienting an object.

Freelance journalist Scott Nover recently encountered a bizarre prompt himself, describing a Captcha as an image featuring a raccoon wearing a jacket and vest surrounded by slices of fruit — and he was asked to select the animal’s bow tie.

However, he would rather complete that task than the mundane task of identifying stoplights given his “long history of being frustrated by the traditional ones,” he said.

Arkose Labs — comprised of artists, cybersecurity geniuses and game designers — is one of the firms tasked with creating some of the head-scratching login puzzles that users encounter.

But even some of the harder Captcha riddles have a solve rate of 94.6% on the first try.

The goal “isn’t to design something that machines can’t do,” Gosschalk noted; it’s to craft puzzles that are “really expensive for developers to try and train software to do.

“Software has gotten really good at labeling photos,” he said.

“So now enters a new era of Captcha — logic based.”