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.
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.
It’s not tinfoil at all.
"To log in, click the stop signs in this image. Please be quick, as our self-driving car is approaching the junction!"
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
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
I mean, I thought it was fairly common knowledge that those image tests were being used to to crowdsource AI training data.
Training and validating machine learning models was always part of the point of captchas, it's not even a secret
Dead internet theory accelerates
Where can I get one of these bots? I fucking despise Captcha
Tanks, I’ll check it out
Maybe we are the bots?
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.
Then they should inverse the result so people who can't solve these pass the test
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