Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

As best as I can tell this study explores many facets of how humans solve captchas. I couldn't find anything about AIs outperforming humans in the study. Can someone give me a section reference?

Solving reCAPTCHA v2/v3 requires more than just clicking the box and an image puzzle. If that was all it was we would be overrun by now.

Lots of folks commenting that the title's statement makes sense because CAPTCHAs are meant to train AIs. While this is broadly true, that's a nice side effect. The way modern CAPTCHAs like reCaptcha V2+ work, is they monitor behavioral analytics-- from things like your browsing history to how your mouse moves on the page. This is why most of the time, most people only need to click a box. I'm not sure there's a LMM out there that includes mouse movement as a modality.

The kinds of AIs that are designed to beat CAPTCHAs also don't have the data from Google et al to use to train, unless we're concerned Google is training it's own bots to bypass CAPTCHAs, I suppose it's not inconceivable?

Yeah, the study is really not about AI solving captchas but how humans solve them. Quite a clickbait title - but those do well on HN unfortunately.

Seems like folks just want to discuss CAPTCHAs generally more ad-hoc, that's cool too, but given how AI has evolved this year, far too many people see this headline and will walk away assuming that the recent AI innovations have made CAPTCHAs useless, but it does not appear to be the case, thankfully.

...Yet, I suppose.

True, the discussion is more about captchas in general. The study isn't bad, I read through it and it's interesting to see real numbers on how long it takes users to solve various captchas. However, a more appropriate title would have been something like "Measuring real user solving times of various captchas" or something like that.

It's in Table 3.

Thank you. The data in that table (for reCAPTCHA, citation 63) is from another paper from 2016 which is focused on solving the actual user-presented problems. It doesn't (directly at least) say they achieved a reliable automation of captcha acceptance, though.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7467367

From the abstract:

> Through extensive experimentation, we identify flaws that allow adversaries to effortlessly influence the risk analysis, bypass restrictions, and deploy large-scale attacks. Subsequently, we design a novel low-cost attack that leverages deep learning technologies for the semantic annotation of images.

I'd suspect reCaptcha has been updated in the 7 years since to address shortcomings.

Another entry in the table (citation 45) is from 2020 and talks about using an object detection AI to solve the image tests. This again looks like it's focused on the task, not the primary mechanism (behavioral analytics).

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