The widespread use of CAPTCHAs — the term for those mashed-up letter sequences you must type to „prove you’re not a robot“ — are not just annoying, they’re also increasingly useless. As Google explained last year, algorithms can now solve 99 percent of the CAPTCHAs out there, including Google’s own version of them.

The good news is that [company]Google[/company] is now offering websites a tool that will let them deep-six the traditional CAPTCHA method and replace it with a box that just asks the user to click a box in response to the usual „I am not a robot“ prompt. It looks like this:

While checking the box might seem less secure than typing jumbled letters, the new process is actually powered by a sophisticated AI analysis that takes account of what the user does before during and after the click. As Google explained in a Wednesday blog post:

[D]istorted text, on its own, is no longer a…