Optical illusions could be the solution to annoying CAPTCHAs

There was a time when CAPTCHAs were the bane of my existence, making me question my sanity (and my humanity). Thankfully technology has developed since the early days of the internet and CAPTCHAs are a little less frustrating, but one new version has caught my eye. May I present optical illusion CAPTCHAs.

Gone are the days of selecting traffic lights or motorbikes in a grid, getting slowly frustrated as you try to appease the CAPTCHA gods. Using AI-generated optical illusions, this new sneaky test is (ironically) difficult for AI to decipher, leveraging the unique way that humans process images. While AI might not like optical illusions, here at Creative Bloq we're no strangers to them – I'd take an optical illusion over a typical boring CAPTCHA any day.

Created by Yuekang Li and the team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, IllusionCAPTCHA uses generative AI to create illusion-like images from abstract prompts. For example, an image of an apple paired with the prompt of a cityscape could generate a city in the silhouette of an apple – something that AI bots will struggle to make sense of.

In the official study, the team explains that the 10 people who took the test successfully identified hidden text illusions 83% of the time, rising to 88% when illusory images were used. On the flip side, when ChatGPT and Gemini were tasked with deciphering the images, they failed the IllusionCAPTCHA test every time.

For a while, tricky visuals like Microsoft’s impossible captchas have been terrorising the internet, so it feels hopeful that we might finally have a solution (for now). For more mind-bending news check out this baseball player optical illusion that shifts right before your eyes.