THE Internet is trying to send me subliminal messages.

While leaving a comment on my friend’s blog, I am told to re-type the characters I see in a picture into a “word verification” box.

“Retragin,” it says.

Hmm, is that some kind of retro-future alcohol? I wonder to myself.

At another website, the word is “Diskill” – reminding me of some existentialist drama in which a guilt-stricken person tries to reverse an act of murder.

Over the past year, I’ve been inspired to jot down these seemingly random words generated by the Internet in a bid to sieve out real humans from spambots.

Called Captchas (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), these online puzzles, featuring weird mangled text, have become a ubiquitous part of the online experience.

So far, I’ve got “presseme”, which connotes for me a very cute French person asking to be touched.

“Florted” conjures up an image of expelling gas while floating in the sea.

Once, I even got “amourme”, which I took to be a sign that I’d better step up the romance in my life.

It’s amazing how one can freely associate meaning with these nonsensical words.

But, as I recently found out, what I’m doing may be more than just an idle linguistic pastime.

Last month, The Economist reported how spammers are stepping up their efforts to use software to automate the solving of Captchas, while giants like Microsoft and Google are trying to tweak their Captcha systems to protect their webbased mail service.

The human ability to recognise mangled text, experts were quoted as saying, was remarkably resilient and it’s one advantage we have over machines.

Two years ago, a new system called ReCaptcha was launched, which derived its source text from old books and newspapers, many from the 19th century.

These are then added to Captcha words, making them harder to read.

I find it ingenious how archaic words are re-entering our lexicon, thanks to ReCaptcha.

Suddenly, these are no longer just silly words, but real terms that have simply fallen into disuse.

It’s as though we have entered the sci-fi worlds of movies like Bladerunner, The Terminator and The Matrix – where the one way to prove that we’re human and thwart artificial intelligence is to draw on Mankind’s shared, distant cultural history; our ability to respond to a past that non-human, high-tech enemies would not know.

I started wondering about the world in which my kids will grow up and live in years from now.

Will the business of proving that a real person is on the other end of a keyboard and broadband connection – as opposed to a piece of online software – become an all-consuming one in the increasingly virtual existence we lead?

It sounds potentially terrifying, but also terribly mundane and inconvenient.

There’s an analogy to parenthood in all this, too.

Even as researchers are racing to develop image-based schemes to replace Captcha, spammers are hiring teams of people in developing countries to break these codes.

It’s like how parents try to set boundaries to keep our offspring in line, while our children constantly evolve new ways to circumvent and outwit us.

Just when we think we’ve got them all figured out, they find ways to fool us again.

And so the world goes.

Captcha me if you can.

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