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

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

#271

Post by Gigachad »

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 just find it very amusing that simple pictures of outside in the US are being described as "unbearably depressing". A pretty good signal that modern urban design in the US is creating very ugly and depressing spaces.

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

#272

Post by thesuitonym »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #192
thaumaturgy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I’m confused about your reasoning. Translating scanned printed material into a searchable text is a social good, but providing safer transportation…that additionally may one day free drivers of the menial work of driving…that is not a social good?

A better way to make safer transportation that may free drivers of the menial work of driving is to design cities that don't require people to drive.

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

#273

Post by aix1 »

jshmrsn wrote: post #82

The photos just look like normal unedited photos of reality. And I suspect that’s the issue. We are becoming accustomed to Instagram style photos depicting a perfect life style with highly exposed and saturated color grading. A raw photo of a street on an overcast day is “depressing” only by relative comparison.

It could also be that not everyone finds car-centric reality (as depicted by those photos) uplifting.

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

#274

Post by Gigachad »

ink_13 wrote: post #41

Well, the pictures all seem to be pretty obviously taken from Street View, which explains the weird angles. I was surprised there was no mention of the palette or the quality of the photos: they're all pretty washed out and gray, fuzzy with no sharp edges, and at a low resolution, like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone.

>like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone.

It's more that its cropped from a much larger photo and the AI has detected that something is here but it isn't 100% on which thing it is out of a few possible candidates. The sharp stuff is already clearly identified.

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

#275

Post by nyanpasu64 »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #37
jszymborski wrote: post #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…

It’s not just that — google wants its own models to be resilient in the face of noisy data. (You’ve probably see examples where a cat is classified as a mountain or something ridiculous due to the addition of precisely crafted noise.) The best way to achieve that resilience is to simply train the models with noisy data; part of the learning process will then be learning to ignore the noise.

But you don't have to show humans the noise when you're getting humans to determine the ground truth, only the neural network. I think the noise exists to trip up CAPTCHA bots.

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

#277

Post by delusional »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #269
22c wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the indignity What's particularly degrading is when it asks you to do something like "select all the bridges" and you as a human see one that is clearly an overpass, not a bridge. You don't select it because it's not what you'd call a bridge. You're inhuman. You're asked to select the motorcycles.. Here's a motorised scooter that looks a lot like a motorcycle. You thought that wasn't a motorcycle? Back to the train…

How is a highway overpass not a bridge? I would classify it as one.

I wonder if captchas are driving any change in language.

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

#278

Post by mlang23 »

CAPTCHAs are discriminating. They fail at what their name suggests they do occasionally. Which means they dehumanize humans. There are humans without eyesight, you know? And some of these have bad hearing. The web has decided that it is OK to classify these people are computers. And nobody cares because the solution is so convenient. Well, thats how society works.

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

#279

Post by Freak_NL »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #244
random_upvoter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could f…

After years and years of captchas I still have no idea if I’m supposed to select all the poles for the traffic lights as well.

Should I click every tile that has a little bit of traffic light in it? Even with just the lamp housing that often means nearly all tiles. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter; it just works. Or not, and then I have no idea why.

Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.

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

#280

Post by mlang23 »

random_upvoter wrote: post #80
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.

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could f…

And there are many stories like this. When CAPTCHA started to be widespread, a lot of my blind friends (including me) suddenly were blocked from using parts of the Internet. We had to find sighted help to solve just a captcha, while everything else basically worked to be done independently. You can not imagine how much sorrow and self-pity CAPTCHAs have generated. I hope the person(s) who willingly allowed this trend to happen will be hit by karma with full force.
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