Select all Images with Severed Body Parts
We live in a world of visual sensory overload. A quadrillion ugly cat photos clog up the internet. But that's nothing, compared to the inferno of reCAPTCHA.
The worst case is the traffic lights. When the traffic lights pop up, I'm lost. Crosswalks are incomparably easier, I can deal with crosswalks. Bicycles? Not a thing! Cabs, stairs, buses, palm trees ... I can find them all. I'm probably the best palm tree spotter west of Wolfenbüttel. Does it have wreath-shaped, frayed leaves at the top and otherwise just a bare trunk that looks like a cell phone mast? Bang, palm tree!
I recognize palm trees in fog, blurred, crooked, overexposed, on a moonless night. Over time, I've become a specialist for even the coarsest palm photos, so that two or three individual palm pixels are enough, and the computer confirms that I'm not a computer. Or rather, not a “robot”.
But the traffic lights present me with a serious problem: what belongs to a traffic light? Only the part with the red, yellow and green lights, of which sometimes only the back is in the picture - or also the gray, ugly pole? Is a traffic light pole identical to the traffic light itself, because without the pole the lights would not be up where they belong?
I don't want to have to answer such questions. I don't even want to have to ask them. Not later, not ever. But especially not now, when I'm just trying to access that page on the Internet. Or sign up for that newsletter. Which I can't do without correctly clicking on reCAPTCHA. All images with traffic lights. And not the ones without traffic lights. There is no discussion.
ReCAPTCHA. The capital letters in this term from the Internet Dictionary of the Inhuman stand for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. If you want to access certain websites, you first have to pass this test and prove that you are not a computer bot. Because nobody wants bots on their site. Instead of intelligent reader comments, for example, they just leave investment offers from Nigerian princes with implausibly high returns.
Now, on the other hand, no sensible adult ever wants to be in a situation in their life where they are asked to select all images with fire hydrants - and then try to solve this task to the best of their ability. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Because it is degrading. Because it's frighteningly similar to the idiot test it actually is.
I mean, nothing against fire hydrants. They're actually nice, cuddly little guys with their droll little stubby arms spread out. But if Mother Evolution had decided that it might be useful for bipeds to click on all the images with fire hydrants, it would surely have grown us our own organ for that purpose. One with a built-in fire hydrant sensor, which then activates a muscle that selects the fire hydrant.
But she didn't. Instead, she gave us all-purpose weapons such as eyes, arms and a highly developed brain. You can do infinitely more useful things with them, and you don't lose ten seconds of irretrievable lifetime every time you do it. According to Wikipedia, one of the original developers of the CAPTCHA security test, Luis von Ahn, later admitted to himself: “He had unintentionally created a system that wasted millions of hours of an extremely valuable resource in ten-second increments: human brain circuitry.”
Even clicking on German public TV broadcaster ZDF with your finger on the remote control to watch their “heute journal” news makes more sense than selecting all the tiles with fire hydrants. Well, bad example perhaps. The only good thing that can be said about tiles with fire hydrants: There are no tiles with fire hydrant poles, which may or may not be part of it. In most cases, a tile with a fire hydrant is quite easy to distinguish from the rest of the world:
However, even with the idiot-friendly fire hydrant, I can't help but attest to the breathtaking ugliness of it and its ilk. In the world of reCAPTCHAS, in which I am increasingly trapped on the Internet like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”, everything is breathtakingly ugly. This is because reCAPTCHA photos are taken from Google StreetView's vast pool of automated street photography, most of which was taken in the USA. Of course, reCAPTCHA, which you can play around with here for free, also belongs to Google.
And US cities are the epitome of ugliness. Especially the horrible suburban KFC car wash Wallmart white-trash concrete wastelands of the Midwest. The epitome of this epitome of ugliness, in turn, are the traffic lights. For some inexplicable reason, they are always placed on the far side of intersections in the USA, where you want to get to when the light turns green. And they are super popularly suspended from cross poles across the entire width of the crossroads. And more often than not garnished with electrical cables like Christmas garlands. Welcome to my CAPTCHA world.
My God, this universe is ugly. The more you delve into it, the more dramatic the details become. Just look at the top left quadrant in the gallery above. Is this really the world we live in today? A pink asphalted road that I have to click on to tick off all the crosswalks? By the way: The quadrant at the bottom right shows a palm tree. I am absolutely sure. I can now even recognize it without leaves, just by the trunk. But does it do me any good? No. They want crosswalks again. Or it doesn't go any further. No exception, no discussion.
But don't worry if you don't find the three hidden Easter eggs. The next reCAPTCHA will follow straight away. To give you another chance to be a little less stupid than the bot. And then another, and another. Meanwhile, the lost lifetime keeps adding up: plus ten seconds, plus another ten, plus another ... and hello, grim reaper. But the lesson here is that it’s life itself that is ugly in all its simplexity.
And it doesn't help that every now and then there's a cuddly fire hydrant wearing a pith helmet in the picture - no, let's just admit it: the majority of the world we move through every day looks like the tile at the bottom left of the following group of six. Or the bottom center, if we're lucky. And then we have to climb staircases like the one at the bottom right because the elevator is broken. Just to throw ourselves into the abyss as soon as we reach the top. It's all so mindbendingly ugly:
Why isn't there a reCAPTCHA “Select all images with severed body parts” yet? In my mind's eye, I see a landscape divided into nine neat tiles with parking lots full of arms, legs and ... other things. It would be so appropriate. Life, or the absence of it, is shown to us here more realistically than anywhere else.
But in the world that reCAPTCHA confronts us with against our will whenever it doesn't suit us at all, there is even more profound wisdom hidden. For example: modern, highly automated artificial intelligence is no more stupid than most people. If the Greens came up with the idea of having all reCAPTCHAS hand-photographed by minimum wage workers as a job-creation program from now on - the result wouldn't look any different. When I walk through the streets and notice what real people take photos of with their cell phones and, above all, how they do it: Please, reCAPTCHA, take over!
If you're wondering why all these pictures are not only miserable as if shot from a freshly operated hip, but as grainy as paparazzi photos of Lady Diana's car in the tunnel, there's a surprising answer: because it annoys computer bots even more than humans. Our bio-brains can still make sense of such distorted image content better than any malware could. Perhaps because we are fatalistic and know from experience: The world itself sucks, stinks and doesn't get any better when you focus on it. An AI, on the other hand, presumably assumes that the world of its creators is perfect and looks accordingly. When it doesn't, the AI is offended and goes home.
However, the inventors of reCAPTCHA seem to have taken into account that even humans can become too depressed by an excess of ugliness to want to solve their security picture puzzles. They therefore offer a second variant at the bottom of their photo mosaic: the audio reCAPTCHA. Unfortunately, this doesn't make the world more elegant. Instead of coarse-grained images, they use the familiar acoustic background noise to confuse the bot. And they select completely random snippets of spoken language, presumably from low-quality public broadcasting programs. You are then supposed to transcribe them word for word. Yeah, try that with examples like this one:
“Obastaffnkräffnun”? Can you say it like that? And what's even crazier: Can you write it like that? How do you spell that? Perhaps “Oba Stafftn Kräftn-uhn”... hello, Duden’s German Dictionary? No answer. It sounds like an excerpt from the Führer’s speech in Chaplin's “The Great Dictator”. Let's try the next audio reCAPTCHA instead:
Uh... you see, this is humiliation! An elderly, distinguished gentleman like me who has written eleven books by his own hand and even won a literary prize is forced to tentatively and embarrassingly write down something like this:
Please believe me, this is most definitely neither a German word, nor phrase, nor even acceptable gibberish in my mother tongue. Yet for some inexplicable reason, reCAPTCHA still found that my audio-to-text transcription was perfectly fine. But that only helped to a limited extent, because now the following message appeared in an alarmist red font: "Several correct solutions are required. Please solve more problems." Why, at your service! While I have nothing better to do.
Ten seconds of my life. Tick, tock, tick, tock ...