Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds : technology

[-] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 154 points 2 years ago

[-] Themadbeagle@lemm.ee 83 points 2 years ago

"Only human intelligence can solve" gives answer

[-] ItsMeForRealNow@lemmy.world 49 points 2 years ago

Levels of smart and dumb. Facepalm moment.

[-] raptir@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago

I think the response is meant to be tongue in cheek.

[-] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago

If that's chatGPT it's supposedly programed to stop looking further at a site when it encounters a captcha. So that response would make sense.

[-] candybrie@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago

The "requires human intelligence and perception to solve" after having just solved it at least feels a little sardonic.

[-] Buttons@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

At this rate Skynet will be like "I'm going to nuke the world on X data, I've already taken over all the launch computers, but I'm not going to tell you or it would ruin my plans."

These LLMs "think" by generating text, and we can see what that text is. It reminds me of this scene from Westworld (NSFW, nudity): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k

[-] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 4 points 2 years ago

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[-] T156@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago

In fairness, that style of captcha has been broken for a while, hence why they're not still in use.

[-] Snowman44@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

ChatGPT just want Mr. Incredible on you.

I'd like to tell you that the captcha says overlooks and inquiry, but I can't. I'm sorry ma'am. I know you're upset. I'd like to help you, but I can't.

[-] transistor@lemdro.id 2 points 2 years ago

Is this real lol?

[-] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 136 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

relevant XKCD

[-] kluevo@lemmy.world 48 points 2 years ago

huh

That... Actually seems like not that bad of an idea (at least for forum/reddit/lemmy bots)

Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

[-] saltesc@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago

Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

Don't you fucking tell me what to do!

gets mace

[-] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

Yes silly humans, fight amongst yourselves

[-] T156@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Wasn't that basically the intention behind the Upvote and Downvote systems in Lemmy, StackExchange/Overflow, Reddit, or old YouTube? The idea being that helpful, constructive comments would get pushed to the top, whereas unhelpful or spam comments get pushed to the bottom (and automatically hidden).

It's just that it didn't really work out quite the same way in practice due to botting, people gaming the votes, or the votes not being used as expected.

[-] Greenskye@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Yep the flaw is assuming that humans would actually select for constructive comments. It's a case where humans claim that's what they want, but human actions do not reflect this. We'd eventually build yet another 'algorithm that picks what immediately appeals to most users' rather than 'constructive'. You'd also see the algorithm splinter along ideological lines as people tend to view even constructive comments from ideologies they disagree with unfavorably

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[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Is it really such a bad thing when the humans that are unable to cooperate do not get access?

[-] Baketime@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

The title text on the comic

And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co- ... oh.

[-] new_guy@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

But what if someone else makes a bot not to answer things but to rate randomly if an answer is constructive or not?

[+] superkret@feddit.de 66 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[deleted]

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I suppose it's this paper. Most prolific author seems to be Gene Tsudik, h-index of 103. Yeah that's not "someone". Also the paper is accepted for USENIX Security 2023, which is actually ongoing right now.

Also CS doesn't really do academia like other sciences, being somewhere on the intersection of maths, engineering, and tinkering. Shit's definitely not invalid just because it hasn't been submitted to a journal this could've been a blog post but there's academics involved so publish or perish applies.

Or, differently put: If you want to review it, bloody hell do it it's open access. A quick skim tells me "way more thorough than I care to read for the quite less than extraordinary claim".

[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You are overrating peer reviewing. It's basically a tool to help editors to understand if a paper "sells", to improve readability and to discard clear garbage.

If methodologies are not extremely flawed, peer reviewing almost never impact quality of the results, as reviewers do not redo the work. From the "trustworthy" point of view, peer reviewing is comparable to a biased rng. Google for actual reproducibility of published experiments and peer-reviewing biases for more details

Preprints are fine, just less polished

[-] brsrklf@compuverse.uk 2 points 2 years ago

Peer reviewing is how you know the methodology is not flawed...

[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Unfortunately not. https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

Most peer reviewed papers are non reproducible. Peer review has the primary purpose of telling the editor how sellable is a paper in a small community he only superficially knows, and to make it more attractive to that community by suggesting rephrasing of paragraphs, additional references, additional supporting experiment to clarify unclear points.

But it doesn't guarantees methodology is not flawed. Editor chooses reviewer very superficially, and reviews are mainly driven by biases, and reviewers cannot judge the quality of a research because they do not reproduce it.

Honesty of researchers is what guarantees quality of a paper

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[-] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 38 points 2 years ago

Curious how this study suggesting we need a new way to prevent bots came out just a fews days after Google started taking shit for proposing something that among other things would do just that.

[-] Overzeetop@kbin.social 37 points 2 years ago

There is considerable overlap between the smartest AI and the dumbest humans. The concerns over bears and trash cans in US National Parks was ahead of its time.

[-] casualhippo@sh.itjust.works 31 points 2 years ago

We all knew this day would come, now it's just a matter of making different captcha tests to evade these bots

[-] jungekatz@lib.lgbt 51 points 2 years ago

They were never a test to evade bots to begim with, most capchas were used to train machine learning algorithms to train the bots on ! Just because it was manual labour google got it done for free , using this bullshit captcha thingy ! We sort of trained bots to read obsucre texts , and kinda did the labour for corps for free !

[-] Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 17 points 2 years ago

I heard Captcha was being used as training data for self-driving cars. Which probably explains why almost all of them ask you to identify cars, motorcycles, bridges, traffic lights, crosswalks etc.

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[-] FatTony@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

New Captcha question: Does pressing a controller's button harder make the character's action more impactful?

if answer = yes : human

if answer = no : bot

[-] snooggums@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

if answer = depends on the game and system : gamer

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[-] C4d@lemmy.world 26 points 2 years ago

I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?

[-] Odelay42@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

Yes, but that's more of a side quest for the system. Primary use case has always been security.

[-] Heresy_generator@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

Maybe. Or maybe it was always about using millions of hours of free labor to tune their algorithms and "bot detection" was just how they marketed it to the people that added it to their sites. Makes me wonder who was running the bots that needed to be protected against. Exacerbate the problem then solve the problem and get what you really want.

[-] Rhaedas@kbin.social 16 points 2 years ago

So just keep the existing tests and change the passing ones to not get access. Checkmate robots.

Just kidding, I welcome our robot overlords...I'll act as your captcha gateway.

[-] Zehzin@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago

It's my fault. I get those wrong on purpose out of spite

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[-] dan1101@lemm.ee 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[removed by mod]

[-] T156@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

It's a double-edged sword. Just because it doesn't work perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't work.

To a spammer, building something with the ability to break a captcha is more expensive than something that cannot, whether in terms of development time, or resource demands.

We saw with a few Lemmy instances that they're still good at protecting instances from bots and bot signups. Removing captchas entirely means erasing that barrier of entry that keeps a lot of bots out, and might cause more problems than it fixes.

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[-] Kichae@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago

Bots picking the questions, bots answering them. They clearly understand whatever the fuck the captcha bot thinks a bus is better than I do.

[-] sprl@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago

I’ve had to do 15 different captcha tests one after the other and they still wouldn’t validate me today.

[-] sramder@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Still can’t get in to archive.ly ;-)

[-] lowleveldata@programming.dev 4 points 2 years ago

Ez. Only allow access when they score 70 to 80.

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[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

So that’s OK - you ‘passed’? You’re a bot!

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