What if we replaced Captchas with tiny flash games requiring a specific score?

AB7ORH7D@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 4 points –

Just a 15 second game like Snake or Helicopter. Should stop a significant level of bots, no?

6

I wonder if you can detect if the player is a bot or not, regardless, most captchas are also ml training if I remember correctly

There are two issue posts on the Lemmy github about the captcha options they considered. It is an interesting read. I had no idea there were so many types or even the existence of embedded options. I thought all were 3rd party and most were google, but I was wrong. Still, there are recent Lemmy posts by the devs basically saying the only option to effectively control the bots is by requiring a valid email for account creation.

With AI capabilities now, surely it’s pretty easy for an AI to follow a set of instructions like: create an email, check email, click link in email…etc - is that correct? Or put another way - why would email verification stump ML so consistently if it’s trained to create emails and do the process

I'm only parroting. The developers of Lemmy mentioned this as the only empirically effective option in the real world. AI in the real world is far dumber than it is framed in the media. Even a well trained model can't just run off on a long tangent path to connect the dots. It only works for a very short time under controlled circumstances in the real world before it must be reset. This is not real AI.

Like others have said already, bots could likely learn to play those easily ... but I'm more concerned about people with disabilities / illnesses that would make playing these games hard, painful or even impossible. Someone who has parkinsons or arthritis for example might be able to click a big square in an image to solve a captcha, but might have trouble to "fine-tune" their movements fast enough to play a minigame that effectively locks them out of the community if they fail, especially if there is a timer involved.