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.

  • @PenisDuckCuck9001
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    6 hours ago

    I fucking hate these. I’ve seen old people that don’t know any better get stuck on these for at least 30 minutes.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 hours ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      135 hours ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        85 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    86 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      35 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 hours ago

      Greetings fellow human!

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

        • @[email protected]
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          13 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1810 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      59 hours ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        38 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

  • @[email protected]
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    37 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    37 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
  • oni
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    37 hours ago

    we have trained them very well

    • @[email protected]
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      23 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      87 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
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      2116 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    431 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      17 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1021 hours 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 day ago

    This is actually a good sign for self driving. Google was using this data as a training set for Waymo. If AI is accurately identifying vehicles and traffic markings, it should be able to process interactions with them easier.

    • @[email protected]
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      621 day ago

      As I understand it, the point of those captchas was never really “bots can’t identify these things” (though you’re right on that it was used to train). They use cursor movement, clicks, and other behaviours while you’re solving it to detect if you are a bot or not.

      • @[email protected]
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        59 hours ago

        Is that why I’m asked to do this over and over for 14 million times when I’m on a VPN?

        • @[email protected]
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          38 hours ago

          It is probably part of it, yeah. But to be clear I’m not a captcha expert or anything, just a layman.

      • @[email protected]
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        91 day ago

        Since I started getting good at yosu and that fishing mini game in farmrpg I’ve been failing more captchas. I wonder if they’re related knowing this

      • @[email protected]
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        1 day ago

        It’s a combination.

        Most captchas goals generally aren’t 100% prevention, it’s to put a workload in front, this makes spamming the site cost money, a bankrolled attempt could just as easily outsource the captchas to real humans.

    • @[email protected]
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      301 day ago

      The annoying thing is that they held us hostage for our free labor, but the results are proprietary for Google’s benefit only.

      That training data ought to be forced to be made freely available to the public, since we’re the ones who actually created it.

      • @[email protected]
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        131 day ago

        Well reCaptcha v1 was used for the digitization of books. And that they proudly talked about.

        But to be honest, the pictures were in fact used to dether bots. But also to teach selfdriving cars. I think I also remember a time they used to ask to fill in house numbers probably for their Maps accuracy.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 day ago

        Its never been confirmed by Google, so I may be wrong. It still tracks that the data harvesting company with a AI self driving car project would use free human labor to identify road hazards.

        • Arthur Besse
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          I was referring to the “This is actually a good sign for self driving” part of their comment.

          The captcha circumvention arms race has been going on for over two decades, and every new type of captcha has and will continue to be broken as soon as it’s widely deployed enough that someone is motivated to spend the time to.

          So, the notion that an academic paper about breaking the current generation of traffic-related captchas (something which the captcha solving industry has been doing for years with a pretty high success rate already) is “good news” for the autonomous vehicle industry (who has also been able to identify such objects well enough to continue existing and getting more regulatory approval for years now) is…

          fry not sure meme template, no text

          • @[email protected]
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            1 day ago

            Not really. I’m not even sure what you’re disagreeing with based on the above comment.

            My point is that if bog standard AI can accurately identify all of the road information from pictures, that is good news for self driving.

            What was once a nearly impossible task for computers is now mundane, and can be used to improve safety/utility for self driving, especially for FOSS projects like comma.ai

    • @[email protected]
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      41 day ago

      Afaik this is precisely what the captcha data was intended for - training AI models. Originally leveraged machine learning. LLMs are a slightly different paradigm but same purpose and results here.

    • @[email protected]
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      36 hours ago

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

    • ohellidk
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      161 day ago

      I’m kind of hoping the AI permanently beats them. I hate them too.