Fiction: Dreams of electric fire hydrants

The knocking at the door persisted. Aidan’s roommate wasn’t supposed to be home for several hours. He thought he could feel his heart pounding inside his chest and his throat constricting. It had been a few weeks since this funny business started. And it all happened because of these captchas.

At the beginning, they were as strings of letters or words. Then it became pictures of fire hydrants and buses. Things took a turn for the creative after that, with sliders matching puzzle pieces to holes and jumbled speech masquerading as actual words. With the advent of Chat GPT and a need for more complex data labeling, proving one’s humanity became increasingly complex, involving reading nonsensical short passages, sometimes with a webcam on, and picking which one sounded more human.

Aidan began his career as an executive assistant. He grew up in Toronto, completed his undergraduate studies there, and found a job in the city. He lived with a classmate for the last ten years, unable to afford the meteoric rent in Toronto despite his commitment to frugality. He went from being a general resource for a small company to becoming a designated assistant to a CEO, something he was very proud of. It wasn’t important to his job that he could pass these tests, but sometimes it would get in the way of some ad-hoc research or booking a flight, when a website wouldn’t let him in because they wanted to ensure that he was human. Aidan was frustrated that it would take more than an hour for him to access this information.

Everyone he spoke to was starting to get fed up with the authentication tests too. Sure, bots were running rampant across the internet, taking up valuable server space and computer power, but was this necessary? Did they need to discriminate, not for just concert tickets and sneaker drops, but to visit Expedia? Which axis of misinformation wanted to crash a website hosting vacation accommodation listings? As far as Aidan was concerned, it was unfair for him and other internet users to be providing free labour to companies who were profiting at both ends: charging for authentication services, and then in turn selling labeled data to AI companies.

Then one day it took him all day to complete the captcha. Reading comprehension had never been his strong suit, which was why he mostly worked with numbers and dates. Ranking statements according to which sounded the most eloquently written or most succinctly worded was a challenge. Because he couldn’t get it right on the first few tries today, the website locked him out, and he had to reset his IP address before trying again. Then he couldn’t get it again. And again. By the time he finally was able to access the website, it was four in the afternoon, and he hadn’t done anything all day. It gave him a small measure of solace to know that he provided the authentication company a bunch of botched data.

Aidan decided that it was enough, and started looking for software that could help him answer the questions, or bypass the captchas altogether. It wasn’t an easy search. If the website in question had paid for a good authentication process, then there would be no automation that could help him crack it, and there were virtually no good solutions for skipping the authentication process. He considered reading comprehension classes, then quickly gave up on the idea; there was a reason he had to take English in summer school to get into college. He sighed and decided to take his daily after-work nap. His roommate was busy articling and wouldn’t be home for another few hours.

The next day, Aidan received a meeting invite from the director of IT security at his company, on the grounds that he had accessed unauthourized websites on company devices. He groaned. He already had so much work left over from yesterday, and now he had to spend an hour on a meeting with IT? He blazed through his work as quickly as he could, completing all of yesterday’s expense reports, and then much of today’s before his IT started the meeting a few minutes before five.

“Hi Aidan, how are you? My name is Bea.”

Bea was an older lady with kind eyes. For the next ten minutes, he listened as she droned through the company security policy, and acknowledged that he understood her. Then the conversation turned weirdly conversational.

“But how are you doing Aidan, really?”

“How’s living in Toronto?”

“Oh really! Do you find that your roommate’s constant absences leave you lonely?”

Didn’t this woman have family to spend time with? By the time they were done, it was nearly six. Aidan didn’t want to be there, but it seemed inappropriate to be so curt with someone senior, so he hung on until Bea seemed satisfied with his responses and signed off for the night.

A few weeks and a few more failed captchas later, Aidan found himself on the internet doing research again. Maybe if he could just find a way to get better at doing them instead of circumventing them altogether, that would be above board. He started with the history of captchas, and then moved onto the modern robotics they were trying to curtail. The point of captchas was that humans could do them with accuracy some eighty percent of the time, whereas the best robots could only manage one out of every ten. Even if he assumed that he was worse at captchas than the average human, it was still inconceivable that he would take all day to do one. That would place him in line with the top robot completion rates.

He clicked through the page on the AI Data Assisted Neuralnet, the leading chatbot that was giving ChatGPT a run for its money, and started to read.

His email client dinged again. It was another email from corporate IT. How did they know? He wasn’t even using his work computer. Then his phone rang. It came from a blocked number. Warily, he picked up. It was Bea.

“Hi Aidan, how are you doing?”

“How did you get my number?”

“You gave it to us when you first applied Aidan, no need to worry.”

“Oh yeah, I guess,” said Aidan, “What’s up?”

“Well, I just wanted to follow up from our conversation from last week,” said Bea.

“Yep, no more cheating on captchas for me!” said Aidan nervously.

“That’s good to hear,” said Bea encouragingly.

There was a pause in the conversation.

“Well, if there’s nothing else, I’ll be going now,” said Aidan.

“Wait, no,” said Bea.

Aidan waited. It seemed like Bea was struggling to find something to say. Then, there was a knock on the door.

Aidan hesitated.

“Why don’t you go answer that,” suggested Bea, “it sounds like your roommate is home.”

The knocking at the door persisted. Aidan’s roommate wasn’t supposed to be home for several hours. He thought he could feel his heart pounding inside his chest and his throat constricting. Or could he?