Featured Image Credit: BBC/Google
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, BBC, Robotics, Technology, World News, Science
Joe Harker
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, BBC, Robotics, Technology, World News, Science
Prepare to start seeing the 'I'm not a robot' box in a whole new light.
You probably don't give a second's thought when clicking the button which pops up on to confirm you're not a robot.
Sometimes, it's followed by a series of small box images where you have to highlight whichever contain a motorcycle or traffic lights or there are contorted letters and numbers you have to identify, but more often than not nowadays, you just tick 'I'm not a robot' and carry on with your internet scrolling.
But what actually happens when you tick that box? And how does the site really know you're not a robot just from a single tick?
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The method is known as CAPTCHA, which stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart' - it definitely sounds like they wanted their acronym for catching out robots to sound like 'capture'.
Some people have always presumed the 'I'm not a robot button' functions in a way to catch out artificial intelligence pretending to be human by seeing whether or not a robot is actually capable of identifying the traffic lights or marking the box with a tick.
However, the actual function of clicking the 'I'm not a robot' button does something quite different to what plenty assumed and it's scaring them a little bit.
As BBC's QI revealed in 2020, ticking the little box is actually letting the site check things like your internet browsing history to determine whether you're a real person or not.
"Ticking the box is not the point. It's how you behaved before you ticked the box that is analysed," writer, comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig explained to the panel.
She continued: "So, to be honest, I can’t tell you all the details because they keep it secret because they don’t want people trying to cheat the test, but broadly speaking, you tick the box and it prompts the website to check your browsing history.
"So let us say, for example, before you tick the box you watched a couple of cat videos and you liked a tweet about Greta Thunberg, you checked your Gmail account before you got down to work - all of that makes them think that you must be a human."
Toksvig went on to explain that the little gizmo has a few other tricks up its sleeve to tell if someone is a human or a robot, and even a second test to throw at someone to make doubly sure.
She said: "Checking the box can even spur it to analyse the way in which you moved your mouse across screen. It's slightly spooky, I think."
"Essentially, when you are clicking ‘I am not a robot’ box, you are instructing the site to have a look at your data and decide for itself.
"If the machine is not sure, that’s when it directs you to click on lightroom pictures of fire hydrants that aren’t there."
This clip has been shared online and the reveal of what the 'I'm not a robot' CAPTCHA actually does has left some viewers a little bit freaked out.
"Mind blown," one admitted, while many others were less than happy to discover what ticking the box actually did.
Someone said it 'feels like an invasion of privacy' and another commented that they 'don't want to believe this'.
Others expressed shock that the CAPTCHA was 'actually invading my privacy', following up their disbelief with a rather succinct 'bloody hell'.
So, now you know that next time you need to click an 'I am not a robot' button it's a good idea to fill up your browsing history with some believably human links and move your mouse in a natural way - whatever that is.