I am not a robot… right? Why captchas are getting harder

Select all the images of a panda wearing glasses. Nope, wrong — try again, idiot.

Raise your hand if you’ve been personally victimized by a Captcha recently.

Now that we all have our hands up: Yeah, Captchas have gotten harder, per The Wall Street Journal.

OK, but why?

Captchas — Completely Automated Public Turing tests — were created to help discern between innocent humans trying to check out and evil bots looking to hack into websites.

And what once involved transcribing a simple string of distorted letters back in 2000 has morphed into a challenge as hard as your daily Wordle.

While it might feel like a play to stop you from online shopping or buying those concert tickets before they sell out, there are actually some other reasons this is happening:

• As bad actors grow smarter, Captchas have had to evolve to keep websites safe from attacks.
• A new industry of third-party Captcha-solving companies has emerged, as has tech that can automatically solve them.
• As puzzle-solving tech mutates, companies that make Captchas, like Arkose Labs, have to make more complicated tasks.

Arkose Labs’ staff of artists and video game designers are tasked with creating more secure puzzles — but even its hardest Captchas, deployed for “high threat” users, have a first-time solve rate of 94.6%.

Feeling puzzled

Adding to the chaos is generative AI, which makes images that are confusing to both bots and humans.

With how intelligent bots are getting, it’s unlikely that there will be any puzzles they can’t solve. So companies like Arkose are instead trying to make Captchas so intricate that they’d cost hackers a lot of money to infiltrate.

All this to say: get ready for Captchas to keep getting wilder. Here’s something to listen to while you scream “I’m not a robot!” at your computer.