Is this a 5 or an S? Does that yellow car count as a taxi? Should I mark the post of the traffic light as well? Everybody knows Captchas, and everybody hates them. Good news: their time might be running out. Bad news: it’s because the machines won.
Bots are finally better than humans at completing those annoying puzzles. That’s one finding of an empirical study that let 1400 participants solve 14,000 Captchas. “The bots’ accuracy ranges from 85-100%, with the majority above 96%. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85%),” reads the paper. Bots were not only smarter, but also significantly faster than humans.
Gene Tsudik of University of California, Irvine, told New Scientist:
We do know for sure that [Captchas] are very much unloved. We didn’t have to do a study to come to that conclusion, But people don’t know whether that effort, that colossal global effort that is invested into solving Captchas every day, every year, every month, whether that effort is actually worthwhile.
