Human Detection

I used to have a CAPTCHA on my blog to try to prevent comment spam. It didn’t work. I’m sure you’ve noticed that CAPTCHAs are becoming more and more difficult to read; this is “necessary” because computers are getting better and better at figuring them out. The CAPTCHA I had was very simple, and it has become clear that the bots could easily bypass it. That’s why I’m excited to update to a game as my human test. It’s an intuitive and cultural test rather than a test of reading skills.

Now, if you try to comment on a page, a little game will pop up before the comment goes through. That pop-up will ask you to do something like: “give the players their sporting equipment” or “feed the food to the baby.” Yes, it’s a little more time consuming for you, but it only takes a few seconds to play and it saves me from mounds of spam! In fact, here in Australia, it take longer for the game to load than for me to complete it.

I think this is a super cool way to filter humans from robots. And when robots can get around this, I’ll just be excited that we’ve created an AI that can complete this kind of cultural test!