Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 863 points –
Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds
independent.co.uk
78

Levels of smart and dumb. Facepalm moment.

I think the response is meant to be tongue in cheek.

If that's chatGPT it's supposedly programed to stop looking further at a site when it encounters a captcha. So that response would make sense.

The "requires human intelligence and perception to solve" after having just solved it at least feels a little sardonic.

At this rate Skynet will be like "I'm going to nuke the world on X data, I've already taken over all the launch computers, but I'm not going to tell you or it would ruin my plans."

These LLMs "think" by generating text, and we can see what that text is. It reminds me of this scene from Westworld (NSFW, nudity): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k

In fairness, that style of captcha has been broken for a while, hence why they're not still in use.

ChatGPT just want Mr. Incredible on you.

I'd like to tell you that the captcha says overlooks and inquiry, but I can't. I'm sorry ma'am. I know you're upset. I'd like to help you, but I can't.

huh

That... Actually seems like not that bad of an idea (at least for forum/reddit/lemmy bots)

Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

Don't you fucking tell me what to do!

gets mace

Wasn't that basically the intention behind the Upvote and Downvote systems in Lemmy, StackExchange/Overflow, Reddit, or old YouTube? The idea being that helpful, constructive comments would get pushed to the top, whereas unhelpful or spam comments get pushed to the bottom (and automatically hidden).

It's just that it didn't really work out quite the same way in practice due to botting, people gaming the votes, or the votes not being used as expected.

Yep the flaw is assuming that humans would actually select for constructive comments. It's a case where humans claim that's what they want, but human actions do not reflect this. We'd eventually build yet another 'algorithm that picks what immediately appeals to most users' rather than 'constructive'. You'd also see the algorithm splinter along ideological lines as people tend to view even constructive comments from ideologies they disagree with unfavorably

That's just a flaw in implementation. Look at the system implemented by Slashdot, still works to this day.

Bots on Reddit already steal parts of upvoted comments and post them elsewhere in the same post to get upvotes themselves (so the account can be used for spam later)

Even with context they can be very difficult to spot sometimes.

Is it really such a bad thing when the humans that are unable to cooperate do not get access?

The title text on the comic

And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co- ... oh.

Sometimes you might need an urgent answer (eg, overflowing sink or a weird smell coming from an appliance problem) and don't have time to fill out a serious form

But what if someone else makes a bot not to answer things but to rate randomly if an answer is constructive or not?

Everyone knows that the real purpose of CAPTCHA tests are to train computers to replace us.

This but unironically.. The purpose literally is to train computers to get better at recognising things

Specifically to help train AI for Google's self driving car division.

Specifically to force all of us to do unpaid labor for Google.

Where's my fucking paycheck‽

And also to frustrate people who use anonimization techniques including use of the Tor Network to get them to turn off their protections to be more easily fingerprinted.

The funniest part of that is the people designing the AI systems seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they're slowly but surely trying to eliminate their own species. ☹️

Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

There is considerable overlap between the smartest AI and the dumbest humans. The concerns over bears and trash cans in US National Parks was ahead of its time.

Curious how this study suggesting we need a new way to prevent bots came out just a fews days after Google started taking shit for proposing something that among other things would do just that.

Just encountered a captcha yesterday that I had to refresh several times and then listen to the audio playback. The letters were so obscured by a black grid that it was impossible to read them.

We all knew this day would come, now it's just a matter of making different captcha tests to evade these bots

They were never a test to evade bots to begim with, most capchas were used to train machine learning algorithms to train the bots on ! Just because it was manual labour google got it done for free , using this bullshit captcha thingy ! We sort of trained bots to read obsucre texts , and kinda did the labour for corps for free !

I heard Captcha was being used as training data for self-driving cars. Which probably explains why almost all of them ask you to identify cars, motorcycles, bridges, traffic lights, crosswalks etc.

Both are right. The older ones with squiggly letters, numbers or that ask you to identify animals or objects were being used to train ai bots.

The ones that ask for crosswalks, bikes, overpass, signs etc are used to train self driving ai.

Yeah thats pretty much what it is being use for now

5 more...
6 more...

Or the other approach, make it even harder for humans

...which is the current trend.

I've found that a lot of sites use captchas or captcha-like systems as a means of frustrating users as a way of keeping away certain people that they don't want to access the site (intellectual property owners), though it's not the only tactic that they use. I mean it works, pretty much all of those sites are still up today, despite serving data that's copyrighted by Nintendo, Sony, and other parties.

New Captcha question: Does pressing a controller's button harder make the character's action more impactful?

if answer = yes : human

if answer = no : bot

6 more...

I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?

Yes, but that's more of a side quest for the system. Primary use case has always been security.

Maybe. Or maybe it was always about using millions of hours of free labor to tune their algorithms and "bot detection" was just how they marketed it to the people that added it to their sites. Makes me wonder who was running the bots that needed to be protected against. Exacerbate the problem then solve the problem and get what you really want.

So just keep the existing tests and change the passing ones to not get access. Checkmate robots.

Just kidding, I welcome our robot overlords...I'll act as your captcha gateway.

So is it time to get rid of them then? Usually when I encounter one of those "click the motorcycles" I just go read something else.

It's a double-edged sword. Just because it doesn't work perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't work.

To a spammer, building something with the ability to break a captcha is more expensive than something that cannot, whether in terms of development time, or resource demands.

We saw with a few Lemmy instances that they're still good at protecting instances from bots and bot signups. Removing captchas entirely means erasing that barrier of entry that keeps a lot of bots out, and might cause more problems than it fixes.

Problem is this assumes that everyone has to build their own captcha solver. It's definitely a bare minimum standard barrier to entry, but it's really not a sustainable solution to begin with.

Bots picking the questions, bots answering them. They clearly understand whatever the fuck the captcha bot thinks a bus is better than I do.

I’ve had to do 15 different captcha tests one after the other and they still wouldn’t validate me today.

Ez. Only allow access when they score 70 to 80.

"Please complete the next 200 captchas so we can have a reasonably accurate estimate of your success rate"