After doing these recaptcha puzzles for a while, I have come to a conspiracy theory. What better way to teach a computer photo recognition than to have millions of people online select correct solutions from random pictures. I am going to start worrying when it asks me to click on all the deplorables....
raven, indeed one of the earliest uses of Captcha was text recognition to assist what amounts to AI "learning" of old or damaged texts. But the major reasons that Captchas work is precisely because machines struggle to correctly identify images and the subtleties associated with them. I have no doubt that AI programmers will indeed use years of Captcha data in order to help train machines, but for less sinister purposes than you might imagine.
MikeD, the increasing use of grainy pictures in the Captcha trials suggest to me that certain groups already are working to train AIs to see through attempts to spoof visual recognition surveillance cameras.
I'd offer that the fact that I now have to go through a minimum of three and often more (once closer to twenty five!) image sets in captcha suggests that the machines are indeed getting better (as the move to blurry text and then images showed). Of course, it may be that they're only getting better at identifying bicycles, traffic lights, and crosswalks. Still, I don't think some concern is unwarranted.
It's not that they're getting better at identifying images. It's that the fewer images are to be chosen from, the more likely it is for a random guess to be correct. Given that a computer can make dozens of attempts per second, you really want to reduce the chance that they can slip through by sheer luck.
And people like the images better than the letters and numbers (as things like S/5, O/0, and I/l/1 can be difficult to distinguish in some Captchas. So it's less sinister than it is people are lazy and hate false positives. At the end of the day, Captchas are there to weed out bots, not frustrate legitimate users.
Military slang for this esteemed craft will be "Rat Warren", or Rat for short.
ReplyDeleteAfter doing these recaptcha puzzles for a while, I have come to a conspiracy theory. What better way to teach a computer photo recognition than to have millions of people online select correct solutions from random pictures.
ReplyDeleteI am going to start worrying when it asks me to click on all the deplorables....
raven, indeed one of the earliest uses of Captcha was text recognition to assist what amounts to AI "learning" of old or damaged texts. But the major reasons that Captchas work is precisely because machines struggle to correctly identify images and the subtleties associated with them. I have no doubt that AI programmers will indeed use years of Captcha data in order to help train machines, but for less sinister purposes than you might imagine.
ReplyDeleteMikeD, the increasing use of grainy pictures in the Captcha trials suggest to me that certain groups already are working to train AIs to see through attempts to spoof visual recognition surveillance cameras.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
https://xkcd.com/1425/
ReplyDeletehttps://xkcd.com/1897/
I'd offer that the fact that I now have to go through a minimum of three and often more (once closer to twenty five!) image sets in captcha suggests that the machines are indeed getting better (as the move to blurry text and then images showed). Of course, it may be that they're only getting better at identifying bicycles, traffic lights, and crosswalks. Still, I don't think some concern is unwarranted.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that they're getting better at identifying images. It's that the fewer images are to be chosen from, the more likely it is for a random guess to be correct. Given that a computer can make dozens of attempts per second, you really want to reduce the chance that they can slip through by sheer luck.
ReplyDeleteAnd people like the images better than the letters and numbers (as things like S/5, O/0, and I/l/1 can be difficult to distinguish in some Captchas. So it's less sinister than it is people are lazy and hate false positives. At the end of the day, Captchas are there to weed out bots, not frustrate legitimate users.
Raven, I got that idea a few months ago. I just ignored it. Skynet is already here after all.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Matrix trilogy now belongs to a black woman. There's a copyright issue with where the W brothers got their original source stories.