In the age of AI, captchas are mostly a burden to humans

[harlan4096]

Captchas were invented in the early 2000s to tackle an issue on the Internet: bots. Bots were used to quickly snag up auctions on eBay, tickets for a concert or sports event, or to take snapshots of websites faster than any human.

The idea was simple: display a basic puzzle to the user to make sure that a human is performing the action and not a bot. This worked fine in the beginning for the most part. Bots were not powerful enough to solve captures quickly or at all at the time.

Captchas evolved, Google acquired the technology a decade ago and evolved it further. Soon, you'd get the dreaded "I'm not a robot" checkboxes and eventually no checkboxes to prove that you were human.



Services like Cloudflare introduced hCaptcha and other solutions to block bots and allow human visitors.

Rise of AI makes captchas a burden, but only for humans 

Systems were invented to bypass captchas, but the rise of AI has made captchas a burden to humans only. According to a 2023 research paper, researchers were able to defeat 70% of captchas in 2016 already.

Extensions like Buster or Privacy Pass promised to improve the handling of captchas. Buster claimed that it could be used to solve any captcha and Privacy Pass was designed by Cloudflare to reduce the number of captchas the service displayed to visitors.

To help solve any captchas, to make the process less cumbersome for humans.

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