HOUSTON — Anyone who has navigated the internet has run into these robot tests. They're called CAPTCHA and they can come in many different forms.
You can be asked to pick all the boxes that include a traffic light or decipher some scrambled mutated-looking text. You can also simply click a box that says, "I am not a robot."
These tests are not just judging your amazing ability to identify a traffic light, but they are also monitoring how you navigate the page because a human will scroll through a page much differently than a bot.
The problem is AI and machine learning are giving bots the ability to behave more like humans, giving them the ability to beat a CAPTCHA.
Humans have also developed CAPTCHA-solving farms staffed with workers overseas that spend all day solving these puzzles for bots. There is another problem as well where some humans get so annoyed by these robot tests they abandon their purchases altogether.
Newer approaches are giving up on challenging humans and now challenge our computers.
According to The Washington Post, sites can look for clues on your computer and browser to see if they are being controlled by a human. So instead of looking at your behavior on a single CAPTCHA page, it will look at how you behaved across the entire website.
While this means you will see fewer traffic light challenges on the big websites, experts warn smaller companies will take longer to make the switch.