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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

#141

Post by jeroenhd »

xdennis wrote: post #101
jeroenhd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google deems your request suspicious enough, yes. You can try this yourself by Googling something suspicious, like common Google dorks. After a few variations of WordPress/phpAdmin Google dorks, you'll get a popup asking you to fill out a CAPTCHA to continue. If you share your IP with lots of people (CGNAT, schools, large offices) then enough weird Googling can get the entire IP address stuck behind CAPTCHA's for…

You can get CAPTCHAs just by turning on a VPN. You don't need to do anything more "suspicious" than that.

I've never experienced this myself. I suppose it depends on what data center the VPN provider is in and what kind of VPN you're using?

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

#142

Post by joegahona »

mixedCase wrote: post #59

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…

I think it's a humor disconnect. The author is expounding on something extremely minor and mundane with a large amount of hyperbole and detail, which his readers may not have thought of with that detail before. Some people might find it funny, others will not. I fall in the former group; I enjoyed it.

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

#143

Post by mrkramer »

mkl wrote: post #136
mrkramer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how we should solve captcha problem? Captcha should be easy to do for humans, easy to verify but hard to solve for bots. It should be humane and happy. How to do it?

It's easy for a bot to provide a pre-recorded or generated video of someone waving, and pronouncing a sentence is much harder for many humans than for bots. I don't think having to prove you're human will ever be a happy experience.

Captcha is served over browsers and browsers and websites can easily detect webcam device and process video recording. The same applies for mic and voice recording.

If webcam or mic is not detected and webcam recording or mic recording was given then obviously malicious actor is trying to cheat the captcha and submit fake recording/s.

Edit: You would be prompted with something like: "Wave your hand from left to right." And then video recorder would be presented to you and you would record yourself doing it and review the footage and submit it to the captcha task.

The same applies to mic and voice recording. For example you would be prompted with: Please say: "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." And then voice recorder would be presented to you and you would say it, review it and submit it in order to fulfill captcha task.

I'm betting on a physical recording device that a person has not on the ability or inability of bots or an AI to come up with a human video recording or a voice recording.

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

#144

Post by the_third_wave »

crazygringo wrote: post #78
mixedCase wrote: post #59

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…

It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too. I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped. Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awarene…

> you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things

That is one way of saying that he simply has not allowed trivial concepts like a bunch of boring pictures to affect his mood. Another way of saying this would be "that sounds good, I wish I were not so affected by these things but alas, I am" or "lucky you, maybe I can find a way to avoid these mind traps".

There is no strength in weakness or defeat, there is no virtue in negativity or pessimism nor is the world a better place for people being triggered by a bunch of boring pictures. Just don't look at the damn things if they bore you, I never do - I just click the link for the audio version.

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

#145

Post by JoeyJoJoJr »

kbutler wrote: post #87
mixedCase wrote: post #59

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…

I think this is a case of hyperawareness/catastrophizing - upon realizing the mindless interruption of CAPTCHAs, the authors have focused so intensely on the minor discomforts of monotonous, poorly composed, poorly shot pictures that the discomfort has grown through hyperbolic focus into a soul-destroying burden. It's like anaphylaxis - a completely outsized and self-harmful reaction to a minor disturbance.

I think the minor disturbance is the article and the outsized reaction is calling it a “soul destroying burden”.

I’m primarily a software dev, but clients mostly value my skills in producing visually pleasing layouts and graphics. I’ve come to realise that good aesthetics are extremely valued by most. Even during the development process, nice looking layouts/design integrated early can immensely lift the team’s spirits.

I have observed though there a some people who seem to undervalue the need of aesthetics, are very quick to write it off as superficial, and may even have some very negative emotional responses to this “arty stuff”. I would chalk up much of the perceived divide between front-end and back-end developers stems from this negative emotional response.

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

#147

Post by dylan604 »

zarzavat wrote: post #126
dylan604 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is finding errors on their side. I was tasked with finding the parking meters, and being told I was missing one. The "one" was an image of a mailbox, not a parking meter. Selecting the mailbox allowed it to say I was a human

The reason this happens is that captchas are not localized. Most countries don't have mail boxes, only US, Canada, Australia, NZ have them so people from outside those countries may not think to distinguish mailboxes from parking meters and will just click every square that matches their mental model of a parking meter (a pole with something on top or a big box)

but that's not what the challenge is. it's more likely the database of training data is wrong. we've seen that to be very true from posts here on HN. some of the data was so horribly mis-identified, it's a wonder it works at all

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

#148

Post by thaumaturgy »

mediocregopher wrote: post #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.

There's a little bit of praxis that I do for these (when I can't just bounce from the site or service requesting it): purposefully get about 25% of it wrong, misidentifying things that aren't traffic lights as traffic lights, or failing to identify all traffic lights, for example. I'll sometimes have to go through a few rounds of captcha but I don't mind that as much when every one is an opportunity to have a tiny corrupting effect on their dataset.

I was fine with Google's captchas when they were designed to help translate scanned printed material into searchable text (providing a social good). I'm not fine with providing free labor for their self driving car project.

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

#149

Post by chrismcb »

crazygringo wrote: post #78
mixedCase wrote: post #59

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…

It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too. I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped. Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awarene…

I'm trying to understand this comment. But it seems to me it boils down to "spend time to learn how to be depressed by the world around you." That doesn't seem like a skill the average person should want or need. There is something with with society if you have to spend time of hours of practice to get "emotional intelligence" from common place items that have no inherent meaning.

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

#150

Post by OJFord »

Swizec wrote: post #89
matheusmoreira wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes. There's nothing like doing 3 noisy slow fade captchas correctly only to be failed for unknown reasons and asked to do even more. It's like it's wondering how much free work it can get out of users before they get mad and give up.

A robot would never give up.

You'd think they couldn't possibly mimic human mouse movement too, and yet I find taking a stupidly exaggerated wavy line between squares helps. Any attempt to get through quickly and efficiently seems to be deemed robotic in my experience.

Reminds me of a bug I found at (with) work last week: typing too quickly (sending auto-completion requests too quickly) locks up the entire page, nothing for it but to refresh. (It's intended to cancel previous requests since only the latest one is needed, but obviously not supposed to freeze.)

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