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i am not a robot
and yet my computer accuses me of being
one
constantly sign up for a fitness app
profile
captcha getting a vaccine appointment
capture buying dumbbells
capture ordering cookies online because
i have no self-control
and the most annoying part i don't
always pass these captcha tests on the
first
try
it feels like captchas are getting
harder and
they are but it turns out there's
a lot more going on behind the scenes
than just
proving you're human
[Music]
the word captcha is an acronym it stands
for
completely automated public turing tests
to tell
computers and humans apart so there's a
little bit of a cheating because the t
there's like a lot of t's in there
turning test to tell
luis von um invented captions
in the year 2000 he was a first-year phd
student at carnegie mellon university
attending a talk by the chief scientist
at yahoo in the year 2000 yahoo was like
the biggest tech
company out there the talk was about 10
problems they
didn't know how to solve and one in
particular stood out
they had this problem that people would
write programs to obtain
millions of email accounts from yahoo
and the people who did that were
spammers so they just couldn't figure
out how to stop it
what we need is a test that can
distinguish humans from computers
the test needed to be passable by any
human regardless of
age gender education or language
that becomes even more challenging
because this is a test
that a computer should not be able to
pass but a computer should be able to
grade
um so it's kind of kind of a paradoxical
idea
the epiphany came when they realized
that humans are
really good at optical character
recognition
aka reading we read text
at all kinds of angles in different
lighting conditions when it's bent over
the seams of a book
when it's in scratchy doctor handwriting
and
we've been training ourselves on how to
do this since we were kids
you don't need to be all that smart or
know how to spell or anything you just
just kind of pattern matching computers
of the era were
really bad at this making it the perfect
test capture programmers would give the
computer the correct text
so it knew the answer then they'd
stretch that text
and warp it the computer with the answer
would be able to grade it but a new bot
that
didn't have the answer wouldn't be able
to understand it
having cracked the code they gave it to
yahoo who started using it on their
front page
for sign ups within a couple of weeks of
the first implementation it was being
used millions of times a day
and the test worked it differentiated
between humans and computers
and helped stop bots but in the
background
all the letters and numbers humans typed
were
doing something else making computers
smarter in 2005
a new version of the test debuted called
recaptcha
it used two words one was generated so
that the computer knew the answer
the second word was pulled from a book
or an old
distorted new york times article and the
computer had
no idea what that word was
when a human got the generated word
right the program assumes they likely
got the other word correct as well
though they'd distribute the same word
to several other people just
to be sure if there was consensus
they'd approve the word
so many tests were taken that a year's
worth of new york times articles
were digitized roughly every four days
then google acquired recaptcha in 2009
and began using the tech to digitize
their scanned books and news archive
when you repeat this process enough
times
you begin to build a robust image
library of distorted characters
and eventually with enough images in
this dataset
the computer becomes smart enough to
extrapolate letters and words
from new images captures basically
taught computers how to read
extremely warped text
in a test by google in 2014 a human
could read their
most distorted captions with about 33
percent
accuracy their ai got it right with 99.8
accuracy and once the computers got
better than humans
the test had to change enter
recaptcha v2 which features images
instead of text they serve the same
purpose
differentiating between humans and
computers and keeping the bots out
but this time google leveraged the tests
by getting humans to teach machines
how to identify real world objects
you might have noticed that v2 tests
often have us selecting transportation
photos
fire hydrants traffic lights crosswalks
and more
google uses this data to train their
self-driving cars
to see these objects as well as to
improve google maps
but just like computers learn how to
read warped text
better than humans they're also getting
better than us
at figuring out these picture puzzles so
much so that
the test had to change again as did the
way the computers graded the test
no captcha and its most recent
counterpart recaptcha v3
verify that you're human just based on
your behavior
so how does that work there's a secret
test
constantly running in the background
making this captcha
nearly invisible if you seem bot-like
like if you click around too quickly or
type out paragraphs of text in seconds
then they'll make you take a standard
picture test
or ask you to verify yourself with
two-factor authentication
pretty much now if you use the web
basically you're being tracked
that's just it the idea is now we can
tell that you're a bot or not because we
can tell who you are
you know you can say this is creepy but
from a usability standpoint that's a lot
better as opposed to me having to
do some puzzle or whatever you kind of
already know yep this is a human
but unlike previous versions of the test
there's no
public-facing answer for what our clicks
might be training computers
to do and it's not clear how long
behavior tracking capture tests will
last before
computers can outsmart them it is my
belief
that at some point computers are going
to be able to do everything that humans
can
it may take a while but at some point
they'll be able to and so there's not
going to be a way to differentiate
between a human and a computer
this was not the first idea we had
actually the first idea we had was
giving you some images and then we would
ask you what are these images off
basically we'll go find a lot of images
of flowers we'll give you a lot of
flowers and we would say hey can you
can you tell us what what these are
images of um
the problem with that is that um humans
were not that great at it
um for one it kind of required them to
spell and you'd be surprised how bad
people
are expelling and then secondly you know
if it's flowers people could say plants
or cars but it turned out all cars also
had tires so people could say tire
and so it was kind of hard to to to get
it right whereas with the with the text
it's this beautiful thing where
not only are humans trained on it from
you know very early but also
there is a key for every thing that we
display like in the in the keyboard
so it's like r yes r uh t
yes t so that's that's why we settled on
that
Please play the YouTube video first