Captcharoo — bot checker

Captcharoo is a simple and secure way to verify that you're talking to a human being and not a bot. It's the world's first Proof of Humanity as a Service (PoHaaS).

Background

I made this project in response to the prevalence of GPT-based/similar AI chat systems in our day-to-day life, and the fear that you may never know if you're really talking to a human.

The inspiration for Captcharoo came when I saw articles about CupidBot, an AI-powered bot that pretends to be a human on dating apps:

The AI algorithm will “swipe on girls that are just your type and constantly works to get high quality matches,” and then a chatbot talks with the women, until they agree to go on a date and arrange a time and place to meet. The date then gets added to the CupidBot user's calendar. — Vice article

I'm in favor of building tools that fight against the AI-ification of our human interactions, so that's where Captcharoo comes in. Next time you're chatting with someone on a dating app, slide them a Captcharoo!

Captcharoo was built by @GuamHat, follow me on Twitter.

How it works

🔐  On the home page, you can write a secret phrase and "lock" it behind a Captcha.

💬  Captcharoo will generate a unique link that you can share with anyone you want to verify as a human.

👩‍💻  When they open the link, they'll be presented with the Captcha. Upon solving it, they can see your secret phrase.

✅  If they say your secret phrase back to you, you can be reasonably sure you're speaking to a human (until Captcha is defeated by the AI's 🥲).

Technical Reasoning

• I chose Next.js because I want SSR for the created Captcharoo pages so that the link preview will show "Captcharoo from <person>"
• I didn't use any styling library for this, just default CSS modules. The project isn't complex enough to need something like Tailwind CSS or even styled-components.
• I chose Supabase as the backend DB. I'm using the platform for the first time and mostly just wanted to try it out. It seemed like a simple serverless DB platform that plays well with Next.js.
• Any phrase you lock with Captcharoo will be encrypted and stored in our database. They won't be stored as plain text, but it would still be best to not write anything sensitive as your secret phrase.

Dev instructions (frontend)

Clone the repo, cd into it, and run npm install.

Then, run the development server:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

You can start editing the home page by modifying pages/index.tsx. The page auto-updates as you edit the file.

Dev instructions (backend)

You need to set up a Supabase DB to store the data. Instructions tbd.

TODO

• Validate the Phrase and Name in phrase creation api
• Error states and character counts for input fields