Turing Tests

By cloud7, 2 February, 2023
By: Josh Dzieza  
@joshdzieza  
Feb 1, 2019, 11:00am EST

At some point last year, Google’s constant requests to prove I’m human began to feel increasingly aggressive. More and more, the simple, slightly too-cute button saying “I’m not a robot” was followed by demands to prove it — by selecting all the traffic lights, crosswalks, and storefronts in an image grid. Soon the traffic lights were buried in distant foliage, the crosswalks warped and half around a corner, the storefront signage blurry and in Korean. There’s something uniquely dispiriting about being asked to identify a fire hydrant and struggling at it.