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.

  • devilish666@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    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 ?

    • SSJMarx@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      7 hours ago

      Same. That’s why Buster is my most recent must-have browser extension, alongside such greats as ublock and sponsorblock.

    • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      10 hours ago

      it’s super ableist. if someone has poor vision or colorblindness chances are they’re going to miss things.

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        9 hours ago

        I have regular everything and I still fuck them up. “click the ones with a fire hydrant”. But a tiny piece of fire hydrant is spilling into another box. Does it count? Does it not count? Good luck!!

        I had one the other day that was deep fried jpegs to the max. Like, what the fuck am I supposed to do.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    361·
    12 hours ago

    Aren’t these Captchas designed to get training data for AI models anyway?

    “System does what it was designed to do” doesn’t feel that surprising…

    • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      73·
      10 hours ago

      Aren’t these Captchas designed to get training data for AI models anyway?

      Yes and no, the captchas are just meant to be hard for computers to solve but easier for humans. People saw that, and thought that “if we’re making people do this might as well have them do something useful” not meant to be malevolent- and the purpose is still stopping bots, training them is a side-effect.

  • Teknikal@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    10·
    10 hours ago

    I just close the page usually if I see one of these ones, I don’t have the patience to click all the boxes and then it just sends you a different one.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      9 hours ago

      Unfortunately they’re on pages that I absolutely need to get into because my money is stored behind them. I cannot stand them, and I generally agree with you, if some random site has me doing a captcha in leaving.

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      59 minutes ago

      It seems like every other captcha I get has a picture of a moped and asks to click for a motorcycle. When I don’t click on the moped it says I’m wrong. Pisses me off.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      6 hours ago

      Greetings fellow human!

      01001000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101111 00111111

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 hours ago

          leaves plastic banana under your bed

          You’ll find that, months from now, and you won’t know where it came from, or why it’s there.

  • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    14 hours ago

    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.

    • yamanii@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      49 minutes ago

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

    • nikaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      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.

    • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.eeEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      I’m already doing that now. If Lemmy starts showing signs of fuckery I’m out. I’ll switch back to magazines.

      • nexusband@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        12 hours ago

        I already did… There’s some subscription stuff where you can read pretty much all available magazines and papers, it’s been a long time since I’ve been reading that much “news” and reports

  • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    11 hours ago

    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
  • sudo@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    Pro-tip for webscrapers: using AI to solve captchas is a massive waste of effort and resources. Aim to not be presented with a captcha in the first place.

    • just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      11 hours ago

      I think thats much more difficult than it seems, because usually only residential IPs are the ones that don’t get those. And if you start to use a residential proxy too much then that IP can also get flagged.

    • SSJMarx@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      The capchas getting really bad on Mullvad almost made me give up on using a VPN. But then I learned about Buster.

      This is my third post in a row shilling for this browser extension lol, it’s so good.

    • unconsciousvoidling@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      11 hours ago

      I was going to say I’ve straight up just left whatever website I was trying to access because I was stuck in some endless loop of clicking on street crossings, buses, bikes, and street lights.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      20 hours ago

      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.

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    443·
    1 day ago

    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.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      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.mlEnglish
      41·
      21 hours ago

      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.