Double Agents The captchas have turned! According to a new report from Vice, hCaptcha, a version of the widely-used gatekeeping integrations designed to keep unwanted bots out of digital spaces, is suddenly starting to keep humans out of those spaces, too. Why? Because they keep asking people to identify increasingly strange, AI-generated images of increasingly bizarre objects — some of which are even entirely nonexistent. Take, for example, the “Yoko,” a bizarre little object that looks to be some sort of a yo-yo-meets-compass-meets-cyborgian-eyeball. “This @hCaptcha is too difficult,” tweeted one unlucky captcha attemptee, “unless we’re expected to assume Yoko” — seemingly a reference to the acclaimed artist and musician Yoko Ono — “is hiding behind the yo-yos.” It’s a comically weird example of unexpected AI-generated chaos, especially considering that hCaptcha markets itself as a “privacy-focused” replacement for the standard reCAPTCHA. And indeed, hCaptcha might just do the trick at keeping bots out of your website — if at the cost of keeping the actual humans at bay as well. This @hCaptcha is too difficult, unless we're expected to assume Yoko is hiding behind the yo-yos? pic.twitter.com/ad4yw4qSN8 — CryptoniteClark (@CryptoniteClark) May 21, 2023 Uncanny Valley Per Vice, the phenomenon seems to be happening a lot on the messaging platform Discord. “This @hCaptcha being used by @discord is pretty bad,” tweeted one impacted netizen, who was asked to identify to identify a “puzzle cube” — a Rubix Cube, seemingly — but was met with a series of decidedly avant-garde versions of the colorful…Captcha AI Asks Users to Identify Bizarre Imaginary Object