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Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

clivethompson.medium.com

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Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#3
For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#4
> Google’s CAPTCHA images are frequently grainy and badly focused. This is likely because, as Vox points out, Google has gone through most of the easy visual-recognition training cases, where the pictures were clear and sharp. Now they’re stuck with the hard stuff, which tend to be pictures of terrible quality.

While this is true, I think some of the artifacts in the accompanying example are added by Google as a sort of adversarial attack on deep learning models trying to solve reCAPTCHA problems.

I've no evidence for it, but the noise in the bottom-left to top-right diagonal all have too much colour jitter to just be camera gain IMHO.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#5
> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search.

Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#6

> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?

If Google doesn't trust your browser for whatever reason (eg. privacy-conscious browsing).

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#7
For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity.

A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#8

> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?

on tor browser it shows them always.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#9

> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?

[deleted]

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#10

> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?

It's a thing. Turn up privacy features in your browser (including the undocumented ones you need to go to about:config to adjust) and stay logged out of google and you'll get them.

Or just fire off a lot of searches pretty fast e.g. by launching a bunch of tabs to search for variations of a term.

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