usatoday24
In 2003 a young Guatemalan named Luis von Ahn published a unique study along with two colleagues from the Carnegie Mellon University and an IBM researcher. That project described an automated test that was easy to solve for humans but practically insurmountable for artificial intelligence systems.
Those researchers called that test Captcha.
The concept was simple and focused on the already famous Moravec paradox: there are things that humans do effortlessly – such as solving the visual puzzles that the captcha propose – but that the machines fail to solve.
The idea turned out to be one of those between one million. Von ahn He ended up creating an improved version to which He called recaptcha that not only verified that you were human: I did it helping Train and perfect OCR systems. That other complementary idea was another unique moment “Eureka!” De von Ahn, and in fact he ended up making him a millionaire in 2009, the year Google decided to buy his service. Then he would dedicate himself to another equally striking project (or perhaps more): Duolingo.
A dizzying (and juicy) evolution
While doing so, the captcha continued to grow and evolve. Putting it more and more difficult for machines that gradually stated that perhaps those tests were no longer so valid. From those basic captchas we ended up moving to recaptchas of all kinds in which visual puzzles not only challenged the abstraction capacity of machines, but also helped to train no longer OCR systems, but artificial vision systems to better recognize cars, buses, zebra crossings or, how not, fire mouths.
But artificial vision and intelligence systems also improved, and that struggle between these tests (Captcha comes from Completely Automated Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) and the machines became more and more interesting. It was a Singular cat and mouse game with spambotsand when some AI system managed to overcome a captcha or any of its variants, the puzzles became more and more difficult.
The story has repeated again.
He did this Friday. It was then that a User of the R/OpenAI community in Reddit published captures of Chatgpt agent overcoming without apparent problems one of the recaptchas more popular and used today on the Internet. This is the system TURONSTIL from Cloudflare, which presents a small box with the text “I’M not a robot“(” I am not a robot “) to click on it. It seems very simple and simple, but it is not so much for the machines.
As indicated in Cloudflare, this recaptcha variant analyzes various signals such as the mouse movement, the time we take to click, the “digital footprint” of our browser, the “reputation” of our IP or some Javascript execution patterns. With them determines whether the user is a human being or is suspicious of being a bot. And if there is suspicion, the system presents after that first captcha another in which we do have to solve some type of visual puzzle.
AI does not know if it is human, it only tries to operate as such
The funny thing here is that Openai’s agent solved the problem in an obvious way: seeing what was on the screen to act accordingly, something that had not been easy until now. The agent was even narrating what he was doing, and while doing that step he showed the following text:
“The link is inserted, so I will click on the” verify that you are human “click to complete the verification in Cloudflare. This step is necessary to demonstrate that I am not a bot and be able to continue with the action.”
Or what is the same: The machine was self -healing like a human being. It is something unusual, but perhaps not quite strange considering that 1) AI does not really know what it says and 2) has been trained to speak (and act, at least in a limited way) as a human being. Operator, Openai’s previous agriculture, passed it really bad With these systems.
Does this mean that captcha are threatened with death? Probably not. This is nothing more than another battle of that war between the bots and the captcha. One that for example we saw Another AI victory In October 2024 but it did not involve the debacle of this type of user verification tests.
As they point out In Ars Technicathe captcha systems have not stopped evolving. From those blurred and deformed texts we go to recaptcha in which we had to solve visual puzzles of all kinds that lately force us not to identify traffic lights, but to place an image in a specific orientation – a increasingly popular system called Arkose MatchKey– Oa having to identify some element of an image that does not agree on it.
In fact, the most recent captchas are no longer so much to prevent bots from exceeding that barrier to slow them so much that making brute force attacks with bots does not compensate.
Captchas not as a barrier, but as a bots brake
An article of those responsible for Arkose Labs, creators of Matchkey, made it clear that “There is no completely impenetrable captcha“, and that with their proposal what they intended was” to introduce an economic deterrence or cost proof for the malicious behavior of the bots. “Or what is the same: than to develop a bot that exceeds those captcha was so expensive that It was not worth it.
Thus, we should not worry much in case the agents of AI can overcome this test, because surely they will appear captchas that continue to assume an almost impassable barrier for these systems. It is precisely the same concept with which it works THE ARC-AGI 2 TESTwhich measures visual understanding and abstract reasoning of AI systems and that is so complicated that the best AI models, which are also very expensive, do not exceed 4% of cases in the best case (O3-Preview).
Will there come a time when those agents of ia get any captcha that we put in front of you? It can be, of course, and it will be then when we have to face How to live with machines In an era in which the Internet no longer manages to differentiate who is human and who is not.
In Xataka | Duolingo inaugurates a new era: when human talent is no longer essential
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings