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.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months 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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      713 months 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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        3 months 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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          13 months ago

          a bankrolled attempt could just as easily outsource the captchas to real humans.

          Exactly. I’ve been using 2captcha for that for over a decade now

      • @[email protected]
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        93 months 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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        53 months 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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          43 months 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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      333 months 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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        3 months 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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          3 months ago

          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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            3 months 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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      43 months 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.

    • Draconic NEO
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      263 months 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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      103 months 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        Fellow vpn user here, it’s been really bad lately. I’m definitely installing this.

    • ohellidk
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      163 months ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      33 months ago

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

  • @[email protected]
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    453 months 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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      123 months 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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      3 months 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.

  • @PenisDuckCuck9001
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    3 months 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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      243 months 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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        243 months 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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          13 months ago

          Spillovers into other boxes definitely count…

          I don’t want to do this next part but I can’t resist…

          Just ask my girlfriend…

          Ba dum tiss

      • Dark Arc
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        23 months ago

        FYI as someone that’s colorblind these captcha’s don’t seem to have anything specially relevant to being colorblind in them.

        Now if they start showing me a dozen traffic cones and asking me to pick the green one, we might have a problem.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      If you’re using a personal api from google, is that a way that google can track you? Part of using a VPN, noscript and adblock for me is to prevent that kind of tracking.

      • tarius
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        3 months ago

        Nothing is truly free with Google. So ya, most likely they are tracking. If you dont want to use Google, there are other options on their wiki

        https://github.com/dessant/buster/wiki

        If not, you can use a dummy account just for this.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Wait, so if a visitor fails the v3 Captcha, v2 is used as a fallback?
    That makes absolutely no sense.

  • Yer Ma
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    243 months ago

    But, I cannot pass those 50% of the time… what does that mean?

  • @[email protected]
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    193 months 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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      63 months 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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        33 months 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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      33 months ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      23 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      33 months 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months 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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      13 months ago

      Greetings fellow human!

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

  • Draconic NEO
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    3 months ago

    CAPTCHA doesn’t stop bots, and let us be honest, it never really did. It frustrated the hell out of people though, and caused people to waste time doing these challenges. Meanwhile even before AI bad actors and bots could get past it simply by using captcha solver services run by exploited humans solving captchas for the service.

    It’s a display of security theater meant to make normies feel safe but in reality doesn’t stop most bad actors.

  • @[email protected]
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    133 months ago

    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…

  • madjo
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    3 months ago

    Meanwhile I sometimes fail those. I have been locked out of applications because I missed a square of a bus, or perhaps because I like to be efficient in my mouse cursor movements. I ducking hate CAPTCHAs.