“CAPTCHA” for critics

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. A CAPTCHA for critics…



When a review is ready to be published, the critic is presented with a randomly generated item to review in one or two sentences.

For a music critic, this might be a 15 sec excerpt; for an architecture or design critic, it could be an image; for a food or wine critic, the system would require a flavour printer.

Readers could use the critics’ responses to these random reviews to ‘calibrate’ the longer review and, over time, they would establish the critics’ humanity.