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Comment by timshell | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. Traditional CAPTCHAs didn't cause bot farms to advance computer vision

I don't see how that contradicts the parent post. Computer vision wasn't as good when reCAPTCHA was still typing out books, but machine learning has (per my expectation, having worked with it since ~2015, but the proof would be in the pudding) likely been good enough for mimicking e.g. keystroke timings for decades. It hasn't been needed until now. That doesn't mean they won't use it now that it is needed. Different situation from where tech did not yet exist

Section 3 anticipates and addresses this objection.

The ultimate challenge is to replicate end-to-end natural human cognition, which is currently an unsolved and hard problem (and also not necessarily the main focus of AI researchers).

> Traditional CAPTCHAs didn't cause bot farms to advance computer vision

Are you sure? And how do you know?

There are a lot of CAPTCHA cracking services. Given the price, they are hardly sustainable even under developing country wage level. I believe they actually solve the easy ones automatically and humans are only involved for the harder ones.

Weren't advancing computer vision (and digitizing books) among the goals of ReCAPTCHA? They seem to have been pretty successful with that.

Google was successful in creating a labeled dataset for computer vision. That’s different than bot farms beating captchas via computer vision because there exists a financial incentive

It's possible they didn't advance computer vision, but they certainly applied it.

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