Bots Are Better at Solving Captchas Than Humans, Research Shows

Those tests you take after entering a password on a website to prove you’re human aren’t as effective as we thought. Researchers at the University of Irvine recently discovered that the besides being time-consuming and annoying for users, they can also be solved faster than bots than they can by humans.

The tests are called captchas, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turning test. Researchers compared the performance of 1,4000 humans and nots across 14,000 various tests. Surprisingly, the bots consistently beat the humans.

For instance, when humans were asked to solve distorted text captchas, they were able to solve them in 9 to 15 seconds. That sounds great until you learn that they were only able to get the answer correctly 50%-84% of the time. 

On the other hand, bots taking the same texts were able to answer the same tests in less than a second, and they were able to do it more accurately, 99.8% accurately, specifically.

According to The Sunday Times, while there had already been some studies proving that bots were able to solve bots, there aren’t many comparing the performance of bots against humans for the tests.

“Based on our study’s extensive measurements of many participants’ captcha-solving times, we can confidently say that most humans are slower than bots. That is a new result,” said Professor Gene Tsudik of the University of California, Irvine, a co-author of the study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Tsudik argues that it’s time that a better solution is discovered.

“The real question is this: why are we still using a technology that is almost universally disliked, costs so much (especially in terms of wasted human time), and is ineffective against bots?” he said.

His theory is that companies are reluctant to change one because larger companies are hesitant to admit the tests, which they often make a good deal of money from selling, are ineffective.

Until companies are willing to admit the tests, which are used on almost every major website, are ineffective, we’ll all have to keep looking for those impossible-to-find traffic lights in blurry photos to prove we’re not the bot that finished the test a while ago.