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.

  • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
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    9 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.

      • nexusband@lemmy.world
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        9 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

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

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

    • nikaaa@lemmy.world
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      9 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.

    • curry@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      Complete the obligatory “is this a staircase or street crossing” round only to be roundhouse kicked back to the beginning.

    • DUMBASS@leminal.space
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      9 months ago

      I had one with one of those Motorcycles with the long handles, apparently they aren’t part of the bike, but the dudes foot holding it up is.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        9 months ago

        I think the reason AI are better than humans is that the AI is just as stupid as the image classifier.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Or, like, “there’s the bottom 10% of a traffic light in this one. Do I click that box? Ia that supposed to count?”

      • thisNotMyName@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Does the backside of a traffic light even count? What about these strange traffic lights that have more boarder than light?

      • toddestan@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        What they are doing is comparing your answer and seeing if it is consistent with how it has been answered previously. They realize that not everyone is going to give the exact same answer, so as long as you answer it in a way that enough other people have answered it, it should let you in.

        I’ll usually go with the minimum number of clicks that I think will get me through, since I’m lazy and it’ll also at times slow down how fast you can click which is annoying.

        I’ll also answer them wrong if I think it’s a mistake that enough other people will make. “Yes… that RV over there is a bus…”

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          9 months ago

          They are also overly US centric.

          One of the questions asks you to click on only the school buses. I had to Google how you tell the difference between a school bus and not a school bus.

          Also is it a crosswalk if it’s at an intersection or is it only a crosswalk if it’s in the middle of a road somewhere?

          The questions either need to be not cultural or they need to be adapted for where they detect the user is coming from, the first option seems easier.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Interesting. Do you not have school buses, or are school buses not distinctly marked? How do kids get to school when it’s beyond walking distance?

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              9 months ago

              They are just buses.

              I guess the British government just assume that school children are smart enough to get on the right bus without them being individually distinct.

              I knew school buses are yellow but I did not realize that they are always yellow. I did not realize that the yellow color meant school. I just assumed that the yellow color was a color busses could be.

              • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                The size of the UK verses the exponentially larger size of the US probably has a lot to do with it.

                And if you knew school busses where yellow… Where’s the problem?

          • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            School busses and regular busses look completely different. What do those look like in your country?

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              9 months ago

              Well here in, not the United States of America land, we just have busses. I was not aware that busses required a special magic paint job.

              I suppose the paint job prevents school shooters wasting their time.

              • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                So if you see a picture that obviously a regular bus, alongside a different bus, what would you infer from that when asked which bus is not the same as “any bus”?

                • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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                  9 months ago

                  How would you know what is a regular bus and what is not a regular bus for a given country?

  • devilish666@lemmy.world
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    9 months 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 ?

  • XNX@slrpnk.net
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    9 months ago

    Unless this was something people could use i dont rly see it becoming much of a problem. Most people dont even use adblockers

  • Teknikal@eviltoast.org
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    9 months 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.world
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      9 months 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.

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
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    9 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.

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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      9 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.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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      9 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.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

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

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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        9 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.

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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        9 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.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
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    9 months 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
  • communism@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

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

    • unconsciousvoidling@sh.itjust.works
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      9 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.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      9 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.

  • sudo@programming.dev
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    9 months 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.com
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      9 months 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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          9 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.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Greetings fellow human!

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

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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      9 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.