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.
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
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.
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!”
https://xkcd.com/1897/
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
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.
I still use it. It pays for discord nitro for me, and an app or three every year.
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