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AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

technologyreview.com

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Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#61

Post by varjag »

chongli wrote: post #54
varjag wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, nearly all human technical advances (flight, propulsion, energy, computation) did not entail examination of biological systems. And ANNs in particular share a host of problems with statistical techniques: black-boxish behavior with lack of human-accessible state introspection and poor tractability.

black-boxish behavior with lack of human-accessible state introspection and poor tractability. I have a philosophical question in response to this. Is it even possible to have intelligence without it being a black box? Are people willing to call something intelligent if they completely understand how it works?

Well my point was rather practical than philosophical: if you take a human at say classification task, they'd be able to explain why they identify bicycle as bicycle and not, say, bulldozer. You can't readily have this with ANNs; all you have is a bunch of weight coefficients and feedback loops.

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#62

Post by varjag »

perfmode wrote: post #48
varjag wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, nearly all human technical advances (flight, propulsion, energy, computation) did not entail examination of biological systems. And ANNs in particular share a host of problems with statistical techniques: black-boxish behavior with lack of human-accessible state introspection and poor tractability.

"On the basis of observation, Wilbur concluded that birds changed the angle of the ends of their wings to make their bodies roll right or left.[30] The brothers decided this would also be a good way for a flying machine to turn—to "bank" or "lean" into the turn just like a bird—and just like a person riding a bicycle, an experience with which they were thoroughly familiar." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothe…

This doesn't however make airplanes aerodynamically anywhere similar to bird flight. Besides, Wright's method of wing warping was soon discarded as structurally unsound and is seldom used now.

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#63

Post by svantana »

gprasanth wrote: post #24

Spam = Problem -> Captcha = Solution -> Captcha Solver = Another Problem. Sigh.

Well if you read the article you'll see that it's only a technology demo, they're not releasing it as a product and their goal is not this but computer vision /brain mimicking in general.

Even CAPTCHA inventor Luis von Ahn has talked about CAPTCHAs being a practical way of generating test data for computer vision systems.

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#65

Post by chongli »

varjag wrote: post #61
chongli wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

black-boxish behavior with lack of human-accessible state introspection and poor tractability. I have a philosophical question in response to this. Is it even possible to have intelligence without it being a black box? Are people willing to call something intelligent if they completely understand how it works?

Well my point was rather practical than philosophical: if you take a human at say classification task, they'd be able to explain why they identify bicycle as bicycle and not, say, bulldozer. You can't readily have this with ANNs; all you have is a bunch of weight coefficients and feedback loops.

if you take a human at say classification task, they'd be able to explain why they identify bicycle as bicycle and not, say, bulldozer.

I don't think this is such an easy task. In the professional world of scientific taxonomy there are many problems with classification. The problem seems to stem from the tension between intensional and extensional definitions.

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#66

Post by TomGullen »

borplk wrote: post #56
TomGullen wrote: post #26

CAPTCHA's did nothing to prevent spam for us. However simply disabling users We initially allowed plain text links but spammers seemed happy to just post them. Spammers want to post hyperlinks, without that ability they can't do anything.

Just an idea: Make links remain as plain text (so they are plain text as far as google is concerned) then use javascript to turn them into clickable links when the user mouse is over or near the link so the user can still click on them.

Spammers still relentlessly spammed us when we turned them into plain text links. Removing the ability to post plain text links was the only thing that stopped them.

No idea why they seemed happy to post plaintext links but there you go!

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#67

Post by welly »

theboss wrote: post #58

I've Used a toolkit like 3 years ago that completely beat the captchas. Recaptchas are harder though. Which did they beat?

Both Captcha and Recaptcha failed terribly on a forum that I run. I run a photography forum and what worked great for me was asking the user signing up to answer a pretty simple question related to this fairly specific (large format) kind of photography. I get no spammers or spambots at all now.

Turning on recaptcha only briefly to test resulted in a mass of spammers.

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#68

Post by MysticFear »

bjterry wrote: post #17

> or let you know how many calories you’re about to eat by looking at your lunch. I have previously told some people that this is the holy grail of dieting apps. The difference in ease of use between entering all of the items in your meal, one by one, and just taking a photo, would be a game changer. Of course, this is just a throwaway example in the article so they probably haven't done any of the work that would be…

Meal Snap, already tries doing this:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meal-snap-calorie-counting/i...

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#69

Post by theboss »

welly wrote: post #67
theboss wrote: post #58

I've Used a toolkit like 3 years ago that completely beat the captchas. Recaptchas are harder though. Which did they beat?

Both Captcha and Recaptcha failed terribly on a forum that I run. I run a photography forum and what worked great for me was asking the user signing up to answer a pretty simple question related to this fairly specific (large format) kind of photography. I get no spammers or spambots at all now. Turning on recaptcha only briefly to test resulted in a mass of spammers.

This is because you can pay to have humans resolve captchas. It is really sad, but worth it I guess to the spammers....

Re: AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

#70

Post by aufreak3 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #53
perfmode wrote: post #34

Advances in storage and compute have led to a disturbing fetishization of machine learning. While the modern Machine Learning Movement makes sense in a historical context and is a reasonable reaction to the disappointing returns from symbolic inference during the early days of AI research, it is terrifying that the research community is satisfied to rely on big data and statistical methods to carry us forward. Few am…

Oh, you just walked into a bloody minefield, mate. Numenta has pulled crap like this before. We know patents may be pending, but you don't have the epistemological right to go blowing the Great Shofar for the invention of True AI with a link to your company's website and a fancy buzzword about neural or cortical this-and-that on the front page. We need to see some published research, or you need to take over the worl…

Wasn't Dileep George part of Numenta?
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