this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

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] 1 points 12 minutes ago

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

[–] pyre 9 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] Dozzi92 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 1 points 34 minutes ago

Sprinkle powdered sugar on them. Delicious deep fried jpegs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

They offer a sound option right below.

[–] pyre 3 points 1 hour ago

a hard to see option, aptly enough

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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 2 points 3 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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 3 points 2 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] 9 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I fail more of those checks then these AI bots do. Surreal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Just be very general, don't get stuck in the details.

[–] Dozzi92 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It goes against my human nature to not overanalyze.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 1 points 31 minutes 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] 2 points 3 hours ago

Bots are answering them wrong. Google takes the most submitted answer as truth.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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] 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] AA5B 3 points 4 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
[–] capuccino 3 points 4 hours ago

we have trained them very well

[–] GoofSchmoofer 16 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

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 11 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] nexusband 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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] 1 points 1 hour ago

I work in a place with no phones. I bring books and magazines into the shitter.

[–] Lemming6969 2 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

So where's my portable app to do so?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 minutes ago* (last edited 9 minutes ago)

There's a browser extension, but it uses an older technique of requesting the audio captcha and then parsing the words, which is probably more energy efficient anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

not at home but I believe there's a few that run in docker.

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