Why can't robots check the "I'm not a robot" checkbox?

📓 The short answer

Robots absolutely can check a box on command. But that checkbox is tracking way more information than a simple checkbox click to determine whether you're a human or a robot.

📚 The long answer

If you want to train a robot to click a checkbox on a website, it's a fairly straightforward process. You write some code that tells your computer:

So can you train a computer to click the "I'm not a robot" checkbox? Absolutely. But there is way more happening behind the scenes of that little box.

The reCAPTCHA checkbox is tracking information on everything leading up to and including the actual click on the checkbox. A key part of the information that gives away whether or not you're human is the path you took to drag your mouse there (if you're on a desktop computer).

If you tell a computer to go to a point on a webpage, it will jump straight to the correct X and Y axis points. You can get fancier and have it mimic a mouse drag to get there, but it will take the most direct path by default: a perfectly straight line to the destination. You can get even fancier and code in some pseudorandom path activity, but it's nearly impossible to mimic the microscopic randomness that humans have when we move our cursors.

To make matters even more difficult for our robot friends, when you land on a page with an "I'm not a robot" checkbox, it is capturing information from your browser including:

• How long it took the page to load
• What browser, plugins, and cookies you're using
• Your timezone and time
• Your screen size and resolution
• Your IP address and general location
• How many key strokes, clicks, and/or scrolls you've made

The reCAPTCHA machine is using all of this information to determine whether or not you're more likely to be a human or a robot. If it can't tell, it may prompt you to do one of those "Click on the image that has this thing in it" challenges, which is more difficult to train a robot to do.
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🧠 Bonus brain points

What's the difference between CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a type of challenge used to determine whether or not a user is a human. It was first invented in 1997 and was usually a display of cryptically designed letters and numbers that humans could decipher but robots couldn't. Eventually, robots were trained on these challenges and could bypass them.

reCAPTCHA is a service acquired and then further developed by Google to achieve the same outcome (determining what users are human) but using far more advanced methods, partially described above.
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🗞 Recommended reading

The robots seem to be getting better at passing our Turing tests. Read this article to learn how GPT-4 (an AI program) hired a TaskRabbit worker to bypass CAPTCHA on its behalf by pretending to be a vision-impaired human in need of assistance. (Thanks Leah for recommending this article for this newsletter edition!)

​Sources​

Book of the Week

​Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson​

Dive deep into the world of programming and the people responsible for creating the digital tools that shape our daily lives. This book is an anthropological look at the world of coding and digs into the morality and politics of code, as well as major controversies. You'll also get a brief history of the field, starting with the pioneering women who were the first coders.

Thompson interviews some of the great programmers of our time, including the creators of Facebook's News Feed and Google's AI, and ponders the implications of coding for civic life and the economy. Through his own personal experiences, Thompson gives readers a close-up look at what superb programming entails and why it matters in understanding the world today.

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