IF AI IS MEANT TO BE SO INTELLIGENT, WHY CAN’T IT IDENTIFY A SET OF TRAFFIC LIGHTS?
STEVE HUNT, VIA EMAIL
It can. Artificial intelligence (AI) is so powerful today that most CAPTCHA images can be easily solved. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is often an image or distorted text that you need to identify or interpret to prove you’re human. Originally, the idea of image-based CAPTCHAs, named reCAPTCHA, was also to help train AIs to perform text recognition better when digitising books. Invented by Luis von Ahn (co-founder of Duolingo), poorly scanned words were shown to humans as a CAPTCHA and by identifying them, we taught the AIs.