Picture the scene: it’s been a few hours since the "game" and in your inebriated state you’ve gone and posted some nonsense on Twitter, or as we’re still getting used to calling it, X. If you get suspended, or your account is flagged for unusual activity, the social media giant has opted for an unfamiliar form of verification to get you back in. Yes, it seems a lot of people are having trouble with the Arkose challenge.

The Arkose challenge is a bit like CAPTCHA in that it’s designed to separate the humans from the autonomous bots (who, it seems, may be getting better at CAPTCHA than we are). It’s pretty peculiar when you first see the Arkose test, made up of sequences of symbols that you have to rearrange in order to match up one selection to another.

Alternatively, you may have to angle objects so that they are facing the same way. However, as in the case of the sweating Jordan Peele CAPTCHA memes, it’s not always as easy to get right as the app implies. The extra snag comes in that you’ve got to get several correct in a row, so if you’ve been wrist-deep in a bargain bucket, it might be worth grabbing a paper towel before your humanity is denied because of chicken grease.

You can try the Arkose challenge if you want to see examples of what you may find yourself up against should your account start behaving strangely, or you violate X’s terms of use. The tech is in line with Musk’s vision to rid X of spam bots, and was actually being rolled out to the platform before his turbulent takeover.

A brief search for “Arkose challenge” on X would appear to indicate that very few are familiar with the anti-bot tech. There’s a central theme of “what the f*** is an Arkose challenge” in most posts about the security measure, and as if the challenge itself weren’t challenging enough, there have been some issues with loading.

Frustrations aside, it seems it may well be time for a new “I am not a robot” test, as robots may be getting better at proving they’re humans than even humans are. The all-too-familiar CAPTCHA tests stand for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” but a preprint study believes they may not be fit for purpose, given how good bots seem to be getting at passing them.

Welcome to the party, Arkose challenge. Let’s see how long the bots take on this one.