Machines are getting better at masquerading as humans

Artificial intelligence inspired by the human brain has achieved a "hallmark of human intelligence" by cracking CAPTCHA tests designed to protect websites from bots, paving a path towards general artificial intelligence. In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers from the AI firm Vicarious demonstrated how they trained an algorithm to defeat the system. CAPTCHA--an acronym for Completely Automates Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart--has been used for 20 years to distinguish human visitors to websites. Captcha tests are designed to protect websites from bots. By recognizing the deliberately ambiguous series of letters and numbers used in the online tests, the AI was able to masquerade as a human and trick websites using the system 67 percent of the time.