I am having quite a bit of trouble solving MO's CAPTCHAs as of today. Has the resolution in the images been lowered or something like that, or am I finding out that, after all, I am but yet another failed attempt at AI?

I found that the captchas got harder when recaptcha started adding a big black dot covering part of each word, with the word in white inside the dot. A couple of things worth noting:

• You can always click the button to get a new pair of words if the ones you have are too mangled.
• If I understand recaptcha correctly, you only have to get one of the words right, but you don't know which one. The other is an unsolved OCR problem and any guess you can provide is helpful, so go ahead and guess. If it turns out that you get it (the known word) wrong, you get to try again, and I'm pretty sure you get to keep trying until you get one or give up. I've just tried failing about 15 captchas in a row, so I know you get at least that many.