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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

#201

Post by revolvingocelot »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #77
TechBro8615 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True civil disobedience would be clicking the non-bikes.

Back when captchas were about optical character recognition, it was obvious which words came from actual books. Plenty of people would input offensive words instead of the correct answer. I hope it had an effect but it probably didn't.

Someone who isn't me hung around on 4chan a lot back in the day. Indeed, there was an effort across the boards to disseminate heuristics to determine which one was the already-known word and which one was to be parsed by humans. The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis".

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

#202

Post by bowmessage »

andrepd wrote: post #71
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.

I'd be sort of okay with the general idea of proving I'm not a robot, you know what really rubs me the wrong way? It's how blatantly dishonest and disrespectful it is. Let me explain: google decides if you're human based on the data it has on you, such as your browsing profile and whether you're logged in to your Google account. Therefore it punishes you for trying to have privacy or refusing to use google services,…

> - Even falsely claim you failed captchas even if you get them right

Do you have a source for this?

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

#205

Post by playguardin »

andrepd wrote: post #71
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.

I'd be sort of okay with the general idea of proving I'm not a robot, you know what really rubs me the wrong way? It's how blatantly dishonest and disrespectful it is. Let me explain: google decides if you're human based on the data it has on you, such as your browsing profile and whether you're logged in to your Google account. Therefore it punishes you for trying to have privacy or refusing to use google services,…

What's wrong with robots?

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

#206

Post by techrat »

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…

> 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?

Nope. I know what Captcha photos are.

Photos from the Google Maps car driving around.

It explains the weird... "depressing" angles and largely brutalist/barren perspectives.

They're the view of a camera on top of the car going through urban centers. Of course streets are going to look like streets and a camera above a car is going to give you weird angles as it drives around town taking pictures of the middle of the road.

Much ado about nothing if you ask me.

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

#207

Post by dougSF70 »

Imagine that self-driving cars are a long way off from being reality because the AI isn't quite good enough to distinguish and classify objects in corner cases - of which there must be numerous. This would suggest these captcha tests are going to be with us for a long while too.

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

#208

Post by bjackman »

mkl wrote: post #125
pkulak wrote: post #36

I'd say it's because the North America, car-dominated, strip-mall-and-stroad landscape is depressing as hell. Open a map and drop yourself somewhere in Europe. I just did, and I feel like identifying crosswalks in a photo like this wouldn't be depressing at all: https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png

I didn't understand "stroad" so I looked it up: > "Stroad" is a word we coined in 2013 to explain those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They're what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) gets combined with a road (a high-speed route between productive places). -- https://w…

Funnily enough my partner (native German speaker - there's only one word for this in German) recently mentioned "the street" and I corrected her saying "no this is not a street it's a road". When trying to explain the difference my first instinct was "a street has buildings on the side, a road is just transportation".

In my European world I think there's pretty much always an unambiguous difference between a street and a road, but "stroad" definitely evokes the places I've seen in sparser urban environments like in USA, South Africa and Australia.

Edit: after more pondering I think you can call the part of a street "the road" to distinguish the part where vehicles drive from the part where humans walk. E.g. "he ran out into the road" might apply where "it's a busy road" would sound wrong.

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

#209

Post by QuarterReptile »

mkl wrote: post #125
pkulak wrote: post #36

I'd say it's because the North America, car-dominated, strip-mall-and-stroad landscape is depressing as hell. Open a map and drop yourself somewhere in Europe. I just did, and I feel like identifying crosswalks in a photo like this wouldn't be depressing at all: https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png

I didn't understand "stroad" so I looked it up: > "Stroad" is a word we coined in 2013 to explain those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They're what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) gets combined with a road (a high-speed route between productive places). -- https://w…

It's a real distinction, but would perhaps be described by a dictionary as antiquated for reasons that could reasonably be considered nefarious.

A relevant Strongtowns quip is a quote of the MUTCD entry for street: "see highway."

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