The HIP creation technique described herein pertains to a technique for creating a human interactive proof (HIP) by applying tearing and/or a conformal transformation to a string of characters while maintaining readability of text. In one embodiment, the technique tears a character string into two or more pieces and applies conformal transformation to warp the pieces in order to create a HIP. The transformation changes the shape and orientation of the characters but preserves angles of the characters which makes it easy for humans to recognize the characters after the transformation. Other embodiments of the technique create HIPs by applying tearing only to a string of characters, or by applying conformal transformation only to the character string.