this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Not The Onion

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[–] Jarmer@slrpnk.net 74 points 2 years ago (9 children)

My tin foil hat tells me that these captcha tests were never about preventing actual bots, but rather they were intentionally put in place for google / whoeverelse to get free training on their image recognition software ai.

[–] stealthnerd@lemmy.world 49 points 2 years ago

You're describing reCaptcha and it's not a secret. It was used to digitize books and improve existing text recognition technology.

There's a TEDx talk from one of the creators from 2011 when they were still widely used.

[–] ebits21@lemmy.ca 40 points 2 years ago

It’s not tinfoil at all.

[–] perviouslyiner@lemm.ee 31 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

"To log in, click the stop signs in this image. Please be quick, as our self-driving car is approaching the junction!"

[–] xxwarlorddarkdoomxx@lemmy.world 21 points 2 years ago

This was probably a bonus of using them, but they did stop bots. They aren’t meant to stop the sophisticated AI we have now, they are meant to stop swarms of “dumb” bots from creating spam accounts, ddosing servers, etc

A few bots accessing your site doesn’t matter. A million bots do

[–] argh_another_username@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why not both? I remember when I used Android and Google had the “Google Survey” or something like that. It was supposed to be a way of receiving money for answering pols and studies. In reality I was training Google Maps. The app payed me between 40c and 60c for answering questions like “were you recently at ? When? Give 1 to 5 stars for your experience.” In the end I bought several apps with that money.

[–] MrSnowy@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

I still use it. It pays for discord nitro for me, and an app or three every year.

[–] Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

That’s not even tinfoil-y at all. That’s exactly what they’re for. These days, they’ve also started branching into training for AI image generators.

I’m pretty sure that’s explicit

[–] Picklebug@artemis.camp 5 points 2 years ago

I mean, I thought it was fairly common knowledge that those image tests were being used to to crowdsource AI training data.

[–] somePotato@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago

Training and validating machine learning models was always part of the point of captchas, it's not even a secret

[–] t0lo@lemmy.world 18 points 2 years ago

Dead internet theory accelerates

[–] maccentric@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Where can I get one of these bots? I fucking despise Captcha

[–] Fargeol@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] argh_another_username@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What’s reality? Have you managed to go to end of the simulation?

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110100

[–] ch1cken@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

Well as long as its slowing down bots its doing its job, it was never meant to stop bots per se. This is especially the case with the new proof of work captchas coming out lately, which don't even require interaction, it just makes it very computationally expensive for bots.

[–] dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Then they should inverse the result so people who can't solve these pass the test