An AI can beat CAPTCHA tests 100 per cent of the time

An artificial intelligence can solve the CAPTCHA puzzles used by websites to distinguish whether browsers are humans or bots 100 per cent of the time.

Andreas Plesner at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues fine-tuned an AI model nicknamed YOLO (You Only Look Once) to become an expert at solving the image-based challenges used to verify identities on websites. The particular type of CAPTCHA it tackled – reCAPTCHAv2, which was developed by Google – asks users to identify certain types of…