Think Like an AI

Every day, I am faced with an obstacle course to get to content: I need to enter a password or click on a link, and I feel nothing about it until I get to a CAPTCHA image to prove that I’m not a robot. All I need to do is look at a picture and click on the squares that fit the requested information (all squares showing cars or traffic lights or crosswalks). Once again, I am doing the EXACT SAME THING that I do when I click other links to enter a site; it’s just a lock on a door to content that I want (like a password), and it’s a pretty simple lock to open (click on the pictures).

But you feel something when you encounter CAPTCHA pictures. And now someone has explained why.

I’m not sure any of this is true, but this article sent me down a deep rabbit hole Googling session. I never noticed that CAPTCHA images usually do not contain people. “Each CAPTCHA depicts a world blasted by a neutron bomb, where the objects survive but none of the people do.”

And the images are at weird angles, almost as if the picture taker is hovering in mid-air.

He writes, “They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.”

Such an interesting thing to finally notice.