This is not an advert, I only know about them because it was integrated with Invidious at some point: https://anti-captcha.com/
> Starting from 0.5USD per 1000 images
Source: I wrote the og detection system for hCaptcha
Here's a fun experiment for someone: 1) Give N people K fake credit cards to enter into a form, and have them solve a captcha 2) Take recorded keyboard and mouse data similar to the captcha 3) Train a neural network model to identify
I've been out of this for 6 years but I bet transformers rock this problem now.
I will say this again, but I think lowering the barrier to entry has created more problems or issues than it solved, if it even solved anything.
1. non-humans can create much more content than humans. There's a limit to how fast a human can write, a bot is basically unlimited. Without captchas, we'd all drown in a see of Viagra spam, and the misinformation problem would get much worse.
2. Sometimes the website is actually powered by an expensive API, think flight searches for example. Airlines are really unhappy when you have too many searches / bookings that don't result in a purchase, as they don't want to leak their pricing structures to people who will exploit them adversarially. This sounds a bit unethical to some, but regulating this away would actually cause flight prices to go up across the board.
3. One way searches. E.g. a government registry that lets you get the address, phone number and category of a company based on its registration number, but one that doesn't let you get the phone numbers of all bakeries in NYC for marketing purposes. If you make the registry accessible for bots, somebody will inevitably turn it into an SQL table that allows arbitrary queries.
4. they'll knock your server offline for everyone else trying to scrape thousands of albums at once while copying your users' uploads for their shitty discord bot and will be begging for donations the entire time too
It becomes a problem when it’s used to spam unwanted content faster than your human moderators can come up with.
Someone might bot to scrape your content and repackage it on their own site for profit.
The bots might start interacting with your real users, making them frustrated and driving them away.
It's a very old service, active since 00s. Somewhat affiliated with cybercrime - much like a lot of "residential proxies" and "sink registration SMS" services that serve similar purposes. What they're doing isn't illegal, but they know not to ask questions.
They used to run entirely on human labor - third world is cheap. Now, they have a lot of AI tech in the mix - designed to beat specific popular captchas and simple generic captchas.