I, for one, welcome our traffic light-identifying overlords.

Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they’re a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.

ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues’ new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google’s ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an “invisible” reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.

Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low “human” confidence rating.

@pixxelkick@lemmy.world
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1919d

Well yeah, I’d hope so, that’s the entire point.

Catcha’s data collection always was with the intent for training ai on these skills. That’s “the point” of them.

It’s reasonable to expect that the older version of captchas can now be beaten by modern ai, because they’re often literally trained on that exact data to beat it.

Captcha effectively is free to use on websites as a tool because the data collection is the “payment”, they then license that data out to people like OpenAI to train with for stuff like image recognition.

It’s why ai is progressing so fast, captchas are one of humanity’s long term collected data silos that are very full now.

We are going to have to keep progressing the complexity of catches as it will be the only way to catch modern AIs, and in turn it will collect more data to improve it.

@MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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618d

Yeah, my understanding is that these capchas were made to harvest data to use for AI/Autopilot driven cars. That’s why they are always having you identify motorcycles, bycicles, crosswalks, stoplights, busses, etc. It’s all stuff that automatic driving cars have had a hard time identifying.

@UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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18d

We are going to have to keep progressing the complexity of catches as it will be the only way to catch modern AIs, and in turn it will collect more data to improve it.

I wanted to use 4chan alot before I came here, but FUCK that slider capcha. I bailed after the first time I didn’t pass.

@Riccosuave@lemmy.world
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418d

I wanted to use 4chan

I am relatively confident that you are one of the first people to ever type that sentence out.

@samus12345@lemmy.world
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2919d

So can we stop using those damn things? They’re super annoying!

@aidan@lemmy.world
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218d

Just means they’ll get harder, but maybe not for people, just needs to be harder for a computer

tarius
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1518d

Buster is awesome to get past recaptcha. I use it with my own Speech to Text API key since its free from Google. Using Google to beat Google.

https://github.com/dessant/buster

@catsrcool@lemmy.world
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318d

It’s so funny that this exists. I’m going to check it out!!

@communism@lemmy.ml
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2719d

And yet I can’t beat the CAPTCHAs because reCAPTCHA doesn’t like VPNs lol

Draconic NEO
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1018d

Captcha these days isn’t even really a CAPTCHA in the traditional sense since most of the work it does is based on filtering of IP and browser fingerprinting, with a certain level of gamification because the goal is not just to keep out the people they fight against, but to waste their time, would work great if it didn’t waste normal people’s time, while real bad actors have easy ways to get around it.

I can see a future where the Internet is completely run by bots and AI to the point where no human actually uses the Internet anymore.

It’s like an island that gets overrun with rats - there are just too many to deal with so you leave.

@lando55@lemmy.world
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1018d

Some believe this happened years ago. Check out Dead Internet Theory.

@nikaaa@lemmy.world
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217d

Yeah, I predict that in the future, you can’t expect that content on the internet is written by humans. If you go to the internet, then it will probably not be to connect to other humans. Maybe you want to know something that a bot can tell you or you have some administrative task to fulfill, like filing a form.

@yamanii@lemmy.world
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217d

Basically Cyberpunk, people only interact with the night city intranet because the global internet has been taken over by AIs.

@TommySoda@lemmy.world
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719d

I mean, we literally train them by completing the CAPTCHAs. Why do you think you were picking things like bikes, traffic lights, cars, and busses? The only question now is what’s next…

@darkkite@lemmy.ml
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319d

they embed dark souls into the browser

In order to pay your utility bill, you have to beat the Undertale Sans fight in Genocide mode

@hOrni@lemmy.world
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419d

Great, so now can I get an add-on to my browser that skips these?

In use an add-on that does 90% of these for me already on Firefox. I would tell you what it’s called but I’m not at my PC.

Which (on a side note) I’d totally go downstairs and check for you, but I just sprained my ankle real bad, and am dreading stairs. Sorry :(

@communism@lemmy.ml
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219d

Sorry to hear about your ankle. When you’re able to, I’d also like to know what the add-on is

@blattrules@lemmy.world
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519d

I never get the first one and rarely the second one. If it says to click all the squares with motorcycles and it’s just the one big picture, am I supposed to click stuff like the tire and mirrors? I always do and never get it right. Then most of the time they ask me to identify motorcycles, they show me motor scooters and what am I supposed to do then? I think I just need to get one of these bots to do it for me.

@roofuskit@lemmy.world
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118d

I bet you use the word “actually” in conversions regularly.

@blattrules@lemmy.world
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118d

I bet you make incorrect assumptions about people you don’t know regularly.

Flying Squid
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118d

Our long international nightmare is finally over!

@MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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518d

Cool, so can Google shut it down now?

@Lemming6969@lemmy.world
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118d

So where’s my portable app to do so?

oni
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118d

we have trained them very well

@AA5B@lemmy.world
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318d

That’s suspicious - I can’t pass 100%. here’s a new captcha for you: make the user do 100 in a row

  • 100% is ai
  • <50% is dumb “ai”
  • in between is a person
@devilish666@lemmy.world
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318d

So…if CAPTCHA are already beaten by bots what’s the point if it still exists ? to mock our weakness ?
In the old days CAPTCHA could do its job, but nowadays nah…even crawler/scrapper/meta bots can bypass it easily.
The real question is why do we as real humans still often fail to beat CHAPTCHA? Are we less human? Are we really robots in CHAPTCHA perspective ?

@nucleative@lemmy.world
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417d

There is a Russian captcha solver bot called xevil that costs under $100 (I think, last time I looked) that has been able to solve nearly all captchas for years. You just have to supply it with relatively expensive proxy IP addresses because Google rate limits solve attempts.

So the title of this article has been true for a long long time. Capatchas are absolutely useless except against poor or uninformed script kiddies.

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