20 ms·

Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

416 points by _Microft 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rickboyce 5y ago
For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!
- Zababa 5y ago
  I was going to say exactly the same thing. Some things are really confusion when you're not from the US. I think it's a problem with internet in general, as many people speaks english and thus people from the USA think everyone is from here.
  - johnsolo1701 5y ago
    Just to share the American perspective, it feels like this: Many people speak English, and thus it is difficult/impossible for people from outside the US to discern the difference between domestic and international services. (Not saying Google is a domestic service obviously.) Through historical chance, we don't have the luxury and benefits of a native language like many of you reading this right now.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      I don't really understand what you mean by this. Do you have any example? Is it something like not knowing if an online store is international or domestic? Because in that case we face the same issue, when I see a store in English I'm not sure it'll ship to Europe, and often doesn't.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      That is one reason I very strongly believe that US-only top level domains like .edu, .gov and .mil should be phased out and replaced with *.us TLDs. Then, US based colleges would be under .edu.us, just like e.g. Australian ones are under edu.au, and US-specific businesses could use .com.us domains to indicate this. But that seems quite tangential to the point that recapcha, being deployed internationally, should be much more effectively culturally internationalised! Just having a language isn’t enough - there are big cultural differences between Spain and Mexico despite both speaking Spanish, and Brazil and Portugal despite both speaking Portuguese, for instance.
- cpeterso 5y ago
  Seems like CAPTCHAs shown to users outside the UA should show local road images because locals know best how to identify objects on their roads. Perhaps Google is prioritizing the autonomous vehicle market in the US for now.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  True, but the questions are still very poorly posed even if you are from the US. Does a corner of a wheel count as a car? Is the square box containing a traffic light a traffic light? What about the horizontal pole on which it is suspended? What about the vertical pole holding up the horizontal pole? If there is one in the distance, does that count? You have to play a game of guessing what other people will guess, and yeah, if you aren't from the US that's a huge handicap, if you aren't neurotypical that's a huge handicap, if you have bad luck that day that's a huge handicap. Google doesn't give a shit, the people who put the captcha in place don't give a shit, you just have to deal with the little Kafka nightmare they dump you in and hope it doesn't lock you out of something critical.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    With all the legitimate criticism of Captchas, this is really a made up one. It doesn't matter. You can get some stuff wrong and still pass, and you can skip/retry if the picture is not clear too. Captchas aren't a "score 100 percent at this minigame" thing, they're more of a "loosely follow these instructions while I watch your cursor and analyze your results to figure out if you're a human or a selenium instance."
    - jlokier 5y ago
      Maybe you can get some stuff wrong and still pass. But if someone has been stuck for 20 minutes on this game, through 30 different screens of it, and not passed yet, you can surely understand why they may think the reason is they are getting some edge-case stuff "wrong" and the machine is very picky, so they have to figure out the secret rules needed to pass. I did try once for 20 minutes to see if tenacity would win, until I gave up because it still hadn't let me pass. I'm pretty sure that my error rate was very low, if not zero. I'm guessing those times when I've been unable to get past a Captcha were due to the IP address I was connecting from, but it's pretty abusive of a site to tell someone it will let them in if they solve a simple test correctly, and then repeatedly show a new version of the test, never letting them in and never telling them no either. Cloudflare and Google have been bad for this.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I was going to vehemently agree and start ranting, but I see you've linked a submission that already has enough of me ranting! Ha. I'll only add that sometimes it annoys me so much I want to create my own 'Britcha' out of spite. Perhaps if I ever run some really popular site I shall: 'select all pubs', 'arrange the squares in order of social class', 'type the word that describes an ordered collection of people waiting for something'.
  - johnsolo1701 5y ago
    Would totally make sense - when visiting .co.uk sites!
    - OJFord 5y ago
      No it wouldn't. Just like American sites, there are very many .co.uk sites that (intentionally) serve a world audience. Different language & currency support is fairly common, and where not present it's usually because other markets aren't deliberately served. I18n/l10n ought to extend to captcha too.
  - prox 5y ago
    Maybe chachacaptcha, with only fun puzzles to solve. Since bots don’t have humor (yet)
- johnsolo1701 5y ago
  Honest question - how can you tell the difference between "English speaking sites" and "American sites"? Since English is currently the common international language, when an American creates a site or service for a domestic audience, anyone around the world can still come visit and read it. But how does one know if a service is meant for a domestic audience? We've all seen services launched by American companies, with American employees, American VC money, that only work within the US, and are only offered in English. We've also all seen how these companies get criticized by people around the world that the service doesn't work in their country and their language. From the American perspective it seems like the rest of the world feels they are automatically entitled to services created here. Even if the stated plan is to eventually roll out to the rest of the world. This behavior is stunningly obvious when a Chinese or Indian company launches an interesting new product or service for a domestic audience. In those cases, it's hard to find people upset that the service only works domestically or doesn't work in their language. This is because those people aren't falling into the logical fallacy of "American = English = International language = International product". As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world? p.s. This is a side question non related to this article specifically - obviously google is an international product.
  - rickboyce 5y ago
    >As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world? First I would say that I don't think I've been, or particularly seen others, be offended by sites that are clearly targeted at a US/North American audience while still being more widely accessible. Usually I am happy that being an English speaker gets me access to a wider set of things on the internet than would otherwise be specifically targeted for where I live. I'd say this is fairly true up until the scale of a company with international presence and operations. Yes there is going to be some vocal minority who behave in an entitled manner and loudly complain that something didn't meet their personal expectations, but this is a small minority and not representative of the wider English-using-international audience. If a site is open and upfront about what they are doing then I wouldn't have any issue. Examples might be using geolocation to restrict access or just having some note making clear that 'this service is for X, use it elsewhere at your own risk'. A good example of this is the range of approaches different sites have taken to GDPR compliance (or that awful cookie law compliance!) following its implementation by the EU and the non-EU countries that have adopted it. Some non-EU sites (possibly based in the US but also plenty of others elsewhere) have used geolocation to restrict access from the EU, others have implemented those consent banners, others have done nothing. However I don't think it is reasonable to blame a company doing any of these, ultimately we are benefitting from the protections the new law provides - if we don't like the wider implications of that then we need to take that up with our lawmakers, not a foreign company located somewhere with their own set of data protection laws. The change for me occurs when a company is an international entity. I realise this is a bit of a grey line as to what defines this, but hopefully we'd all agree that FAANG meets this definition. When you're actively engaged with international markets and generating significant revenue in countries around the world I think it is a reasonable expectation that you either: a) make services culturally and linguistically localised; or b) more carefully target a service to some specific regions. TLDR - at a small scale, if you are open & clear about your intentions I don't think you need to worry about 'insulting the rest of the world' - if you get significant traction in another country you should probably open a dialogue with that user base to understand their views.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Yeah, this annoys me so much. Some just grate (we don’t have ‘crosswalks’ here, we have ‘pedestrian crossings’) but for some things I literally just don’t really know what they look like in the US and have to just guess!
jszymborski 5y ago
> Google’s CAPTCHA images are frequently grainy and badly focused. This is likely because, as Vox points out, Google has gone through most of the easy visual-recognition training cases, where the pictures were clear and sharp. Now they’re stuck with the hard stuff, which tend to be pictures of terrible quality. While this is true, I think some of the artifacts in the accompanying example are added by Google as a sort of adversarial attack on deep learning models trying to solve reCAPTCHA problems. I've no evidence for it, but the noise in the bottom-left to top-right diagonal all have too much colour jitter to just be camera gain IMHO.
- bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
  It’s not just that — google wants its own models to be resilient in the face of noisy data. (You’ve probably see examples where a cat is classified as a mountain or something ridiculous due to the addition of precisely crafted noise.) The best way to achieve that resilience is to simply train the models with noisy data; part of the learning process will then be learning to ignore the noise.
  - 8note 5y ago
    You might also be able to get away with cheaper cameras
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    But you don't have to show humans the noise when you're getting humans to determine the ground truth, only the neural network. I think the noise exists to trip up CAPTCHA bots.
    - azalemeth 5y ago
      I think you're right -- if you browse from a "worse" IP, you get more grain added. I hate gCaptcha. HCaptcha is a little better but still bad...
    - jszymborski 5y ago
      You know, that was my initial reaction reading that comment, but thinking about it a little more made me realise that if you pass the noisey images to humans, they can validate if the noise is such that the signal is gone. I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it would be a clever way to do data augmentation.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?
- duped 5y ago
  It happens to me all the time after I started using VPNs regularly.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  If you're accessing via a VPN, not logged into a Google account, doing a bunch of searches quickly... absolutely. Basically, the more you appear like you might be trying to scrape Google results or otherwise abuse Google with an unreasonable quantity of requests, it'll ask you to prove you're human and not a bot.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    I occasionally get them even while logged in. I assume it's some combination of VPN, browser privacy features, and the browser search shortcut (instead of going through google.com or changing the search from another results page).
- semperdark 5y ago
  If Google doesn't trust your browser for whatever reason (eg. privacy-conscious browsing).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kenniskrag 5y ago
  on tor browser it shows them always.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mediocregopher 5y ago
For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I understand why websites need to use captcha. I do not understand why websites that have user accounts cannot offer the option of 2FA TOTP, or even SMS login to avoid captcha. Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
    - JoeOfTexas 5y ago
      SMS is expensive.
      - netr0ute 5y ago
        It's less expensive than losing customers due to a bad UX.
        jcims 5y ago
        But more measurable.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        TOTP is free, and can simply be made an option to avoid CAPTCHA.
      - 5y ago
mdeck_ 5y ago
Here I was expecting a deep analysis and explanation of why the engineering and businesses at play behind Captchas leads to such depressing images... instead I simply found a litany of the ways in which the images are depressing. Not quite as interesting. I’m reminded of Artistotle’s 4 kinds of causes—or, here, you might say 4 kinds of “whys”
- paulpauper 5y ago
  way, why same thing lol
PhasmaFelis 5y ago
I wish my life was so utterly without other problems that I could get this worked up about something so minor and meaningless.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  yet it went viral, so apparently a lot of ppl find it interesting, and the traffic probably is an incentive for him to keep writing similar articles about seemingly mundane things. There is a huge online audience for mundane observations, as opposed to the always-on news cycle.
  - jcims 5y ago
    Probably for the same reasons that one of the predominant tones on Twitter is howling despair about, in the larger view, trifling things
- gdulli 5y ago
  You just did.
  - PhasmaFelis 5y ago
    Enh, not really. I got worked up enough to write one (now three!) sentences, not a lengthy article with illustrative screenshots.
- rvz 5y ago
  Well yeah exactly. It is petty and meaningless. They already accepted Google doing this stuff to them for a long time and now they complain over a storm in a tea cup. Goodness me. When this drops off of the top of HN, they will continue to click Google reCAPTCHAs once again, reminding them who really runs the web and how we got here in the first place. And it is all thanks to everyone for accepting Google and doing that all by themselves. Have a pat on the back for your participation folks!
leephillips 5y ago
I was considering dropping one of my VPS hosts, and when they started putting captchas in the way of logging in, that was the final straw that convinced me. It has also affected my decisions whether to sign up for or use other services. I wonder if web-based businesses consider the lost revenue resulting from annoying their customers or prospective customers this way?
swayvil 5y ago
Reality has 2 components. 1. The physical part. Sight, sound, etc. 2. The ideas. Some kinds of reality are beautiful and meaningful all by itself. Flowers, healthy people, healthy animals, forests, natural landscapes, clouds, stuff like that. Some kinds of reality are beautiful and meaningful only when you consider the ideas associated with them. Cars, streets, books, powerlines, stacks of money, feces, etc. And without the ideas they are quite ugly and nihilistic. These AI pictures here are that second variety. It makes you think. Or something.
Animats 5y ago
They have to be taken from odd angles. Otherwise, they'd match the data sets used to train object recognizers. This is a losing race with neural nets. CAPTCHAs are running into the same problem that Yosemite park rangers report with "bear proof" trash cans and storage lockers: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
pkulak 5y ago
I'd say it's because the North America, car-dominated, strip-mall-and-stroad landscape is depressing as hell. Open a map and drop yourself somewhere in Europe. I just did, and I feel like identifying crosswalks in a photo like this wouldn't be depressing at all: https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png
- mkl 5y ago
  I didn't understand "stroad" so I looked it up: > "Stroad" is a word we coined in 2013 to explain those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They're what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) gets combined with a road (a high-speed route between productive places). -- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-... That's pretty confusing, since in NZ the words "street" and "road" have identical meaning and are totally interchangeable. Is this distinction real in the US, or another thing Strong Towns have invented?
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The different words for pavement became separate categories as the culture started to demand an easier way to add context to what you’re saying. English is very efficient in that context is often assumed or hidden in the different meanings of the words.
  - thescriptkiddie 5y ago
    Americans also tend to use the words fairly interchangeably, but there is still at least some instinctive distinction. People often say "kids are playing in the street", but they almost never say "kids are playing in the road".
  - LukeShu 5y ago
    That's not a distinction I've ever encountered (from Indiana, US). I'd have said they were interchangeable, but if you told me there was a difference, and asked me what it was, my best guess would have been that a street is urban and a road is rural, just based on experience with whether something tends to be named "XXX St" or "XXX Rd". Wiktionary tells me that a street is within a single city/town, while a road runs between cities/towns, which I guess seems about right to me?
ink_13 5y ago
Well, the pictures all seem to be pretty obviously taken from Street View, which explains the weird angles. I was surprised there was no mention of the palette or the quality of the photos: they're all pretty washed out and gray, fuzzy with no sharp edges, and at a low resolution, like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  >like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone. It's more that its cropped from a much larger photo and the AI has detected that something is here but it isn't 100% on which thing it is out of a few possible candidates. The sharp stuff is already clearly identified.
MrManatee 5y ago
This is making me wonder if the experience is intentionally so bleak. It reminds me of how nowadays when I do an incognito Google search on my phone, I need three taps just to accept the terms of service. Same with YouTube. Maybe this level of cumbersomeness is somehow legally required now, but I find it more likely that this is an attempt to subconsciously encourage people to not browse incognito—so that they can be tracked. My understanding is that being logged in in your Google account often allows you to bypass captchas. If captchas are a miserable experience, this would have a similar effect of subconsciously discouraging incognito browsing.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  It does feel like a similar sort of thing to how fag packets are this horrible murky brown with bleak pictures in them in the UK.
  - adamcharnock 5y ago
    fag is British slang cigarette, for any scandalised US folk reading this :-) (Does this still need saying?)
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      There’s always someone who is learning this for the first time!
      - someguy101010 5y ago
        Lucky 10k
        ryankrage77 5y ago
        And for those in the lucky 10k learning about the lucky 10k today, https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
mrkramer 5y ago
As far as I understood the problem with Captcha was and is that it is too American not in a bad sense but culturally. People coming and using the Internet from developing countries might not be able to solve Captcha because their culture is different. I was thinking how to solve this problem and I came to the conclusion that it is very hard to design puzzle for every country in the world so I decided to put them in cultures something like Civ game but then again the whole process of solving Captcha should be easy not exhausting and time consuming. My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human. You can detect webcam presence and webcam input very easily. Or if mic is present you can use mic and pronounce some sentence in order to verify that you are human. As well as webcam you can detect mic presence and mic input easily so Captcha can not be cheated by automated bots. My solution is humane input as solution to the puzzle or to the task not observing pictures and writing down the text because every computer bot can do it just as good as humans or even better. Captcha should be easy to do for humans, easy to verify but hard to solve for bots. In my opinion depressing Captcha is not the problem the problem is that bots came to the point where they are as good as humans solving Captcha but some people struggle solving Captcha because they are not familiar with American culture or simply they do not know English.
- LandR 5y ago
  > My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human. This seems even worse to me. Wave at the camera to prove you are human... This is a whole other level of creepy above depressing captchas. I would not do this, ever.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    My solution was all about solving cultural problem of captcha as well as security by that I mean automated bots exploiting and solving captcha en masse. Ofc the service would guarantee you privacy I don't need to keep the video footage of you or the mic footage I would delete it immediately when the captcha task is solved. You would need to trust the service the same like people are trusting logless VPN providers with their sensitive internet traffic logs.
pyuser583 5y ago
I’ve always wanted to do humorous/depressing captchas. “Select all the images of public executions.” “Select all the images of disgraced politicians.” “Select all the images convicted war criminals.”
ljm 5y ago
> Looking at these leaden vistas of America This touches on something else: are all the Google captchas, worldwide, based on photos taken within the US? I suspect they are, and cultural imperialism is at play: taxis in New York are yellow, therefore a yellow car must be a taxi. That kind of thing.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Or a 'vette. Can't forget the canary yellow corvettes.
mixedCase 5y ago
I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha.
- lgeorget 5y ago
  I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  How many times have you gotten locked out by a captcha? I don't mean "try again," I mean the neverending cycle of "try again" that completely prohibits you from going about a particular piece of business. My guess: you are US-informed enough, neurotypical enough, good enough at guessing constraints to fix underdetermined prompts, and use proxies little enough that capchas have never been more than an annoyance for you. Please understand that your experience is not universal.
  - dinkleberg 5y ago
    Did you read the article? Your argument has nothing to do with the point of the article nor OPs comment.
jshmrsn 5y ago
The photos just look like normal unedited photos of reality. And I suspect that’s the issue. We are becoming accustomed to Instagram style photos depicting a perfect life style with highly exposed and saturated color grading. A raw photo of a street on an overcast day is “depressing” only by relative comparison.
- aix1 5y ago
  It could also be that not everyone finds car-centric reality (as depicted by those photos) uplifting.
teebs 5y ago
Will we ever run out of CAPTCHAs that computer vision can't solve? When reCAPTCHA was started, it used difficult-to-read letters to digitize books, but that's long gone at this point. It seems like Google's been feeding us all pictures of street features to identify for years. Someday adversarial models will catch up and be able to pass these CAPTCHAs (or maybe all CAPTCHAs) right? What then?
wilde 5y ago
I’m amused whenever I get one image “wrong” and have to click it anyway. “I can see how you might think that’s a boat but I assure you it’s a mailbox.” “COMPLY” “This hurts you more than it does me. click”
impendia 5y ago
Some of the captcha photos remind me of Studio Ghibli's animation films, in a positive way. The films linger on random objects in landscapes, from a variety of perspectives, for longer than feels "natural". Something about the effect is mesmerizing. When I finished Whisper of the Heart, I remembered thinking that Kondo had made the suburbs of Tokyo look beautiful. It seemed that he'd done so simply by depicting them, by showing them as worth looking at.
walrus01 5y ago
If you want to see a lot of captchas, try browsing with Firefox mobile with ublock origin installed. It's sad how many people design for 100% chrome. To the point that being a stock Firefox user agent that doesn't receive all ads shows up as if you're a bot scraping the site.
- judge2020 5y ago
  It all comes down to how lazy (or perhaps cost-conscious) the developers of the website are. Most traffic is Chrome and Safari, so running those two tests covers nearly 85% of users[0] and most other browsers like Firefox make an effort to fix incompatibilities with Chrome. It’s the same for captchas - most people aren’t running in anonymous mode, and when they are, their IP is usually part of a major ISP and thus reputation can be partially assumed by the IP instead of browser cookie. It often doesn’t make sense to spend extra money just so to appease something like 5-10% of internet users (and might be less than 1% of a company’s actual customer base). 0: https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/
  - walrus01 5y ago
    One could have written the same thing about internet explorer in 2001 or so. History repeats itself.
derefr 5y ago
> The one exception is, improbably, palm trees. I keep on getting CAPTCHAs asking me to recognize palm trees. I have no idea what’s going on there! Did, like, a Waymo car once slam into a palm tree? Palm trees look kind of like street signs, and show up in places street signs also show up. To recognize street signs, an AI needs both examples of street signs, and examples of things that look like street signs, but aren't.
rajacombinator 5y ago
>dude you need to power the Google botnet. it’s for security. Yea that’s depressing.
human 5y ago
If you get depressed by captcha images, your life is too easy.
dredmorbius 5y ago
My RECAPTCHA policy: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371588129861216 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371588129861216
dirtyid 5y ago
I wish there was more captcha options. I'm tired of training autonomous driving in North America.
backtoyoujim 5y ago
Are Captchas a version of Proof of Work ?
danellis 5y ago
> I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems. Then you are free to not use the service that you are not paying for.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- playguardin 5y ago
  What's wrong with scraping?
dougSF70 5y ago
Imagine that self-driving cars are a long way off from being reality because the AI isn't quite good enough to distinguish and classify objects in corner cases - of which there must be numerous. This would suggest these captcha tests are going to be with us for a long while too.
srswtf123 5y ago
The thing that gets me is this: I don’t want to train AI for free. If you’re going to train models using our input, then you need to distribute the results as public good and make no profit from it.
moonbug 5y ago
yes the pictures are dismal, but that's the reality of suburban America.
jmclnx 5y ago
Captcha has made me move to DucDuckGo, I hope Google is listening <<<<
wombatmobile 5y ago
> Why are these photos so depressing? What is it about their composition that is so enervating? If the causality was a property of the images, those questions would have definitive answers. But our emotions are not transmitted to us by inanimate objects or images. They come from within our psyches. There is an element of choice to what we feel. If there wasn’t, we would be zombies, or machines, or vulnerable imbeciles who could be overcome by an enemy combatant who would need no gun, knife or club - just a picture of a traffic light.
jollybean 5y ago
It's frustrating because they represent the actual drudgery of real life. It's not pretty, there's no beauty filter, there's no composition etc.. It shows that we live mostly in bits of fairly ugly industrial landscape.
legohead 5y ago
failed one of these recently because it asked me to click on "bicycles", but there were a lot of motorcycles, and I didn't click on those... so I failed
ctdonath 5y ago
Captcha: prove you’re not a robot by teaching robots how to prove they’re not robots.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
z0ltan 5y ago
It's always been blatantly obvious that captchas and its variants were primarily to get free work out of people to train their A.Is, not for anything else really.
yepthatsreality 5y ago
Use the audio puzzle and type incorrect words that sound right.
mlang23 5y ago
CAPTCHAs are discriminating. They fail at what their name suggests they do occasionally. Which means they dehumanize humans. There are humans without eyesight, you know? And some of these have bad hearing. The web has decided that it is OK to classify these people are computers. And nobody cares because the solution is so convenient. Well, thats how society works.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  They do have somewhat accessible alternative modes. Give them a try (these are even more dystopic — try having it read out some numbers for you to type).
factorialboy 5y ago
How much does Google owe us for training their AI all these years?
jpalomaki 5y ago
Maybe the boring explanation is that street view scenery is the largest, fit for purpose dataset that Google actually owns and can safely use for this purpose.
Radim 5y ago
"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines." — God Emperor of Dune Frank Herbert was a genius.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
so essentially the Captcha is the AI's sneaky way of getting humans to understand them, once we understand them the process of assimilation is at least 30% of the way done. Next - the hardware fittings. Actually - if I was the AI trying to assimilate the humans I would start selling a google glasses type thing that allows you to skip captchas by automatically informing the captcha that a human is watching - watching through the AI's eyes.
sveniv 5y ago
We don’t know what this training data might be used for in the future, especially considering it could be stolen. I always feel uneasy clicking on school busses, it feels too similar to a shoot em up game where I have to eliminate all of them, then “verify” when I’m done. Perhaps the interface is too similar to a scope on a weapon overlaid on everyday images.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
Sometimes the captcha says I'm wrong even though I'm write because it got something very similar to something else. Then you end up having to think like an AI, which is super weird
HalfEye 5y ago
why do they keep using captchas when they so obviously discriminate against visually handicapped but people who can still easily use computers? Don't programmers know there are laws against that? I know they don't care but to choose as it as a means of proof of humanity - something that's illegal in many countries - seems so backward of technology.
EyeTheGreat 5y ago
why do they keep using captchas when they so obviously discriminate against visually handicapped but people who can still easily use computers? Don't programmers know there are laws against that? I know they don't care but to choose as it as a means of proof of humanity - something that's illegal in many countries - seems so backward of technology.
Friedeye 5y ago
Why do they keep using captchas when this test of humanity has such a major flaw and there are so many people with this degree of visual disability who can still easily use computers? Don't programmers know there are laws against that? I know they don't care but to choose it as a means of proof of humanity - a test considered illegal in many countries - seems truly backward of technology.

416 points by _Microft 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!

Zababa 5y ago
I was going to say exactly the same thing. Some things are really confusion when you're not from the US. I think it's a problem with internet in general, as many people speaks english and thus people from the USA think everyone is from here.
- johnsolo1701 5y ago
  Just to share the American perspective, it feels like this: Many people speak English, and thus it is difficult/impossible for people from outside the US to discern the difference between domestic and international services. (Not saying Google is a domestic service obviously.) Through historical chance, we don't have the luxury and benefits of a native language like many of you reading this right now.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I don't really understand what you mean by this. Do you have any example? Is it something like not knowing if an online store is international or domestic? Because in that case we face the same issue, when I see a store in English I'm not sure it'll ship to Europe, and often doesn't.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    That is one reason I very strongly believe that US-only top level domains like .edu, .gov and .mil should be phased out and replaced with *.us TLDs. Then, US based colleges would be under .edu.us, just like e.g. Australian ones are under edu.au, and US-specific businesses could use .com.us domains to indicate this. But that seems quite tangential to the point that recapcha, being deployed internationally, should be much more effectively culturally internationalised! Just having a language isn’t enough - there are big cultural differences between Spain and Mexico despite both speaking Spanish, and Brazil and Portugal despite both speaking Portuguese, for instance.
cpeterso 5y ago
Seems like CAPTCHAs shown to users outside the UA should show local road images because locals know best how to identify objects on their roads. Perhaps Google is prioritizing the autonomous vehicle market in the US for now.
jjoonathan 5y ago
True, but the questions are still very poorly posed even if you are from the US. Does a corner of a wheel count as a car? Is the square box containing a traffic light a traffic light? What about the horizontal pole on which it is suspended? What about the vertical pole holding up the horizontal pole? If there is one in the distance, does that count? You have to play a game of guessing what other people will guess, and yeah, if you aren't from the US that's a huge handicap, if you aren't neurotypical that's a huge handicap, if you have bad luck that day that's a huge handicap. Google doesn't give a shit, the people who put the captcha in place don't give a shit, you just have to deal with the little Kafka nightmare they dump you in and hope it doesn't lock you out of something critical.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  With all the legitimate criticism of Captchas, this is really a made up one. It doesn't matter. You can get some stuff wrong and still pass, and you can skip/retry if the picture is not clear too. Captchas aren't a "score 100 percent at this minigame" thing, they're more of a "loosely follow these instructions while I watch your cursor and analyze your results to figure out if you're a human or a selenium instance."
  - jlokier 5y ago
    Maybe you can get some stuff wrong and still pass. But if someone has been stuck for 20 minutes on this game, through 30 different screens of it, and not passed yet, you can surely understand why they may think the reason is they are getting some edge-case stuff "wrong" and the machine is very picky, so they have to figure out the secret rules needed to pass. I did try once for 20 minutes to see if tenacity would win, until I gave up because it still hadn't let me pass. I'm pretty sure that my error rate was very low, if not zero. I'm guessing those times when I've been unable to get past a Captcha were due to the IP address I was connecting from, but it's pretty abusive of a site to tell someone it will let them in if they solve a simple test correctly, and then repeatedly show a new version of the test, never letting them in and never telling them no either. Cloudflare and Google have been bad for this.
OJFord 5y ago
I was going to vehemently agree and start ranting, but I see you've linked a submission that already has enough of me ranting! Ha. I'll only add that sometimes it annoys me so much I want to create my own 'Britcha' out of spite. Perhaps if I ever run some really popular site I shall: 'select all pubs', 'arrange the squares in order of social class', 'type the word that describes an ordered collection of people waiting for something'.
- johnsolo1701 5y ago
  Would totally make sense - when visiting .co.uk sites!
  - OJFord 5y ago
    No it wouldn't. Just like American sites, there are very many .co.uk sites that (intentionally) serve a world audience. Different language & currency support is fairly common, and where not present it's usually because other markets aren't deliberately served. I18n/l10n ought to extend to captcha too.
- prox 5y ago
  Maybe chachacaptcha, with only fun puzzles to solve. Since bots don’t have humor (yet)
johnsolo1701 5y ago
Honest question - how can you tell the difference between "English speaking sites" and "American sites"? Since English is currently the common international language, when an American creates a site or service for a domestic audience, anyone around the world can still come visit and read it. But how does one know if a service is meant for a domestic audience? We've all seen services launched by American companies, with American employees, American VC money, that only work within the US, and are only offered in English. We've also all seen how these companies get criticized by people around the world that the service doesn't work in their country and their language. From the American perspective it seems like the rest of the world feels they are automatically entitled to services created here. Even if the stated plan is to eventually roll out to the rest of the world. This behavior is stunningly obvious when a Chinese or Indian company launches an interesting new product or service for a domestic audience. In those cases, it's hard to find people upset that the service only works domestically or doesn't work in their language. This is because those people aren't falling into the logical fallacy of "American = English = International language = International product". As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world? p.s. This is a side question non related to this article specifically - obviously google is an international product.
- rickboyce 5y ago
  >As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world? First I would say that I don't think I've been, or particularly seen others, be offended by sites that are clearly targeted at a US/North American audience while still being more widely accessible. Usually I am happy that being an English speaker gets me access to a wider set of things on the internet than would otherwise be specifically targeted for where I live. I'd say this is fairly true up until the scale of a company with international presence and operations. Yes there is going to be some vocal minority who behave in an entitled manner and loudly complain that something didn't meet their personal expectations, but this is a small minority and not representative of the wider English-using-international audience. If a site is open and upfront about what they are doing then I wouldn't have any issue. Examples might be using geolocation to restrict access or just having some note making clear that 'this service is for X, use it elsewhere at your own risk'. A good example of this is the range of approaches different sites have taken to GDPR compliance (or that awful cookie law compliance!) following its implementation by the EU and the non-EU countries that have adopted it. Some non-EU sites (possibly based in the US but also plenty of others elsewhere) have used geolocation to restrict access from the EU, others have implemented those consent banners, others have done nothing. However I don't think it is reasonable to blame a company doing any of these, ultimately we are benefitting from the protections the new law provides - if we don't like the wider implications of that then we need to take that up with our lawmakers, not a foreign company located somewhere with their own set of data protection laws. The change for me occurs when a company is an international entity. I realise this is a bit of a grey line as to what defines this, but hopefully we'd all agree that FAANG meets this definition. When you're actively engaged with international markets and generating significant revenue in countries around the world I think it is a reasonable expectation that you either: a) make services culturally and linguistically localised; or b) more carefully target a service to some specific regions. TLDR - at a small scale, if you are open & clear about your intentions I don't think you need to worry about 'insulting the rest of the world' - if you get significant traction in another country you should probably open a dialogue with that user base to understand their views.
stephen_g 5y ago
Yeah, this annoys me so much. Some just grate (we don’t have ‘crosswalks’ here, we have ‘pedestrian crossings’) but for some things I literally just don’t really know what they look like in the US and have to just guess!

jszymborski 5y ago

> Google’s CAPTCHA images are frequently grainy and badly focused. This is likely because, as Vox points out, Google has gone through most of the easy visual-recognition training cases, where the pictures were clear and sharp. Now they’re stuck with the hard stuff, which tend to be pictures of terrible quality. While this is true, I think some of the artifacts in the accompanying example are added by Google as a sort of adversarial attack on deep learning models trying to solve reCAPTCHA problems. I've no evidence for it, but the noise in the bottom-left to top-right diagonal all have too much colour jitter to just be camera gain IMHO.

bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
It’s not just that — google wants its own models to be resilient in the face of noisy data. (You’ve probably see examples where a cat is classified as a mountain or something ridiculous due to the addition of precisely crafted noise.) The best way to achieve that resilience is to simply train the models with noisy data; part of the learning process will then be learning to ignore the noise.
- 8note 5y ago
  You might also be able to get away with cheaper cameras
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  But you don't have to show humans the noise when you're getting humans to determine the ground truth, only the neural network. I think the noise exists to trip up CAPTCHA bots.
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    I think you're right -- if you browse from a "worse" IP, you get more grain added. I hate gCaptcha. HCaptcha is a little better but still bad...
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    You know, that was my initial reaction reading that comment, but thinking about it a little more made me realise that if you pass the noisey images to humans, they can validate if the noise is such that the signal is gone. I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it would be a clever way to do data augmentation.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?

duped 5y ago
It happens to me all the time after I started using VPNs regularly.
crazygringo 5y ago
If you're accessing via a VPN, not logged into a Google account, doing a bunch of searches quickly... absolutely. Basically, the more you appear like you might be trying to scrape Google results or otherwise abuse Google with an unreasonable quantity of requests, it'll ask you to prove you're human and not a bot.
- Izkata 5y ago
  I occasionally get them even while logged in. I assume it's some combination of VPN, browser privacy features, and the browser search shortcut (instead of going through google.com or changing the search from another results page).
semperdark 5y ago
If Google doesn't trust your browser for whatever reason (eg. privacy-conscious browsing).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kenniskrag 5y ago
on tor browser it shows them always.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mediocregopher 5y ago

For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

Zababa 5y ago
Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I understand why websites need to use captcha. I do not understand why websites that have user accounts cannot offer the option of 2FA TOTP, or even SMS login to avoid captcha. Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
  - JoeOfTexas 5y ago
    SMS is expensive.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      It's less expensive than losing customers due to a bad UX.
      - jcims 5y ago
        But more measurable.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      TOTP is free, and can simply be made an option to avoid CAPTCHA.
    - 5y ago

mdeck_ 5y ago

Here I was expecting a deep analysis and explanation of why the engineering and businesses at play behind Captchas leads to such depressing images... instead I simply found a litany of the ways in which the images are depressing. Not quite as interesting. I’m reminded of Artistotle’s 4 kinds of causes—or, here, you might say 4 kinds of “whys”

paulpauper 5y ago
way, why same thing lol

PhasmaFelis 5y ago

I wish my life was so utterly without other problems that I could get this worked up about something so minor and meaningless.

paulpauper 5y ago
yet it went viral, so apparently a lot of ppl find it interesting, and the traffic probably is an incentive for him to keep writing similar articles about seemingly mundane things. There is a huge online audience for mundane observations, as opposed to the always-on news cycle.
- jcims 5y ago
  Probably for the same reasons that one of the predominant tones on Twitter is howling despair about, in the larger view, trifling things
gdulli 5y ago
You just did.
- PhasmaFelis 5y ago
  Enh, not really. I got worked up enough to write one (now three!) sentences, not a lengthy article with illustrative screenshots.
rvz 5y ago
Well yeah exactly. It is petty and meaningless. They already accepted Google doing this stuff to them for a long time and now they complain over a storm in a tea cup. Goodness me. When this drops off of the top of HN, they will continue to click Google reCAPTCHAs once again, reminding them who really runs the web and how we got here in the first place. And it is all thanks to everyone for accepting Google and doing that all by themselves. Have a pat on the back for your participation folks!

leephillips 5y ago

I was considering dropping one of my VPS hosts, and when they started putting captchas in the way of logging in, that was the final straw that convinced me. It has also affected my decisions whether to sign up for or use other services. I wonder if web-based businesses consider the lost revenue resulting from annoying their customers or prospective customers this way?

swayvil 5y ago

Reality has 2 components. 1. The physical part. Sight, sound, etc. 2. The ideas. Some kinds of reality are beautiful and meaningful all by itself. Flowers, healthy people, healthy animals, forests, natural landscapes, clouds, stuff like that. Some kinds of reality are beautiful and meaningful only when you consider the ideas associated with them. Cars, streets, books, powerlines, stacks of money, feces, etc. And without the ideas they are quite ugly and nihilistic. These AI pictures here are that second variety. It makes you think. Or something.

Animats 5y ago

They have to be taken from odd angles. Otherwise, they'd match the data sets used to train object recognizers. This is a losing race with neural nets. CAPTCHAs are running into the same problem that Yosemite park rangers report with "bear proof" trash cans and storage lockers: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

pkulak 5y ago

I'd say it's because the North America, car-dominated, strip-mall-and-stroad landscape is depressing as hell. Open a map and drop yourself somewhere in Europe. I just did, and I feel like identifying crosswalks in a photo like this wouldn't be depressing at all: https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png

mkl 5y ago
I didn't understand "stroad" so I looked it up: > "Stroad" is a word we coined in 2013 to explain those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They're what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) gets combined with a road (a high-speed route between productive places). -- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-... That's pretty confusing, since in NZ the words "street" and "road" have identical meaning and are totally interchangeable. Is this distinction real in the US, or another thing Strong Towns have invented?
- judge2020 5y ago
  The different words for pavement became separate categories as the culture started to demand an easier way to add context to what you’re saying. English is very efficient in that context is often assumed or hidden in the different meanings of the words.
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  Americans also tend to use the words fairly interchangeably, but there is still at least some instinctive distinction. People often say "kids are playing in the street", but they almost never say "kids are playing in the road".
- LukeShu 5y ago
  That's not a distinction I've ever encountered (from Indiana, US). I'd have said they were interchangeable, but if you told me there was a difference, and asked me what it was, my best guess would have been that a street is urban and a road is rural, just based on experience with whether something tends to be named "XXX St" or "XXX Rd". Wiktionary tells me that a street is within a single city/town, while a road runs between cities/towns, which I guess seems about right to me?

ink_13 5y ago

Well, the pictures all seem to be pretty obviously taken from Street View, which explains the weird angles. I was surprised there was no mention of the palette or the quality of the photos: they're all pretty washed out and gray, fuzzy with no sharp edges, and at a low resolution, like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone.

Gigachad 5y ago
>like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone. It's more that its cropped from a much larger photo and the AI has detected that something is here but it isn't 100% on which thing it is out of a few possible candidates. The sharp stuff is already clearly identified.

MrManatee 5y ago

This is making me wonder if the experience is intentionally so bleak. It reminds me of how nowadays when I do an incognito Google search on my phone, I need three taps just to accept the terms of service. Same with YouTube. Maybe this level of cumbersomeness is somehow legally required now, but I find it more likely that this is an attempt to subconsciously encourage people to not browse incognito—so that they can be tracked. My understanding is that being logged in in your Google account often allows you to bypass captchas. If captchas are a miserable experience, this would have a similar effect of subconsciously discouraging incognito browsing.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
It does feel like a similar sort of thing to how fag packets are this horrible murky brown with bleak pictures in them in the UK.
- adamcharnock 5y ago
  fag is British slang cigarette, for any scandalised US folk reading this :-) (Does this still need saying?)
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    There’s always someone who is learning this for the first time!
    - someguy101010 5y ago
      Lucky 10k
      - ryankrage77 5y ago
        And for those in the lucky 10k learning about the lucky 10k today, https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

mrkramer 5y ago

As far as I understood the problem with Captcha was and is that it is too American not in a bad sense but culturally. People coming and using the Internet from developing countries might not be able to solve Captcha because their culture is different. I was thinking how to solve this problem and I came to the conclusion that it is very hard to design puzzle for every country in the world so I decided to put them in cultures something like Civ game but then again the whole process of solving Captcha should be easy not exhausting and time consuming. My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human. You can detect webcam presence and webcam input very easily. Or if mic is present you can use mic and pronounce some sentence in order to verify that you are human. As well as webcam you can detect mic presence and mic input easily so Captcha can not be cheated by automated bots. My solution is humane input as solution to the puzzle or to the task not observing pictures and writing down the text because every computer bot can do it just as good as humans or even better. Captcha should be easy to do for humans, easy to verify but hard to solve for bots. In my opinion depressing Captcha is not the problem the problem is that bots came to the point where they are as good as humans solving Captcha but some people struggle solving Captcha because they are not familiar with American culture or simply they do not know English.

LandR 5y ago
> My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human. This seems even worse to me. Wave at the camera to prove you are human... This is a whole other level of creepy above depressing captchas. I would not do this, ever.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  My solution was all about solving cultural problem of captcha as well as security by that I mean automated bots exploiting and solving captcha en masse. Ofc the service would guarantee you privacy I don't need to keep the video footage of you or the mic footage I would delete it immediately when the captcha task is solved. You would need to trust the service the same like people are trusting logless VPN providers with their sensitive internet traffic logs.

pyuser583 5y ago

I’ve always wanted to do humorous/depressing captchas. “Select all the images of public executions.” “Select all the images of disgraced politicians.” “Select all the images convicted war criminals.”

ljm 5y ago

> Looking at these leaden vistas of America This touches on something else: are all the Google captchas, worldwide, based on photos taken within the US? I suspect they are, and cultural imperialism is at play: taxis in New York are yellow, therefore a yellow car must be a taxi. That kind of thing.

dylan604 5y ago
Or a 'vette. Can't forget the canary yellow corvettes.

mixedCase 5y ago

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha.

lgeorget 5y ago
I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?
jjoonathan 5y ago
How many times have you gotten locked out by a captcha? I don't mean "try again," I mean the neverending cycle of "try again" that completely prohibits you from going about a particular piece of business. My guess: you are US-informed enough, neurotypical enough, good enough at guessing constraints to fix underdetermined prompts, and use proxies little enough that capchas have never been more than an annoyance for you. Please understand that your experience is not universal.
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  Did you read the article? Your argument has nothing to do with the point of the article nor OPs comment.

jshmrsn 5y ago

The photos just look like normal unedited photos of reality. And I suspect that’s the issue. We are becoming accustomed to Instagram style photos depicting a perfect life style with highly exposed and saturated color grading. A raw photo of a street on an overcast day is “depressing” only by relative comparison.

aix1 5y ago
It could also be that not everyone finds car-centric reality (as depicted by those photos) uplifting.

teebs 5y ago

Will we ever run out of CAPTCHAs that computer vision can't solve? When reCAPTCHA was started, it used difficult-to-read letters to digitize books, but that's long gone at this point. It seems like Google's been feeding us all pictures of street features to identify for years. Someday adversarial models will catch up and be able to pass these CAPTCHAs (or maybe all CAPTCHAs) right? What then?

wilde 5y ago

I’m amused whenever I get one image “wrong” and have to click it anyway. “I can see how you might think that’s a boat but I assure you it’s a mailbox.” “COMPLY” “This hurts you more than it does me. click”

impendia 5y ago

Some of the captcha photos remind me of Studio Ghibli's animation films, in a positive way. The films linger on random objects in landscapes, from a variety of perspectives, for longer than feels "natural". Something about the effect is mesmerizing. When I finished Whisper of the Heart, I remembered thinking that Kondo had made the suburbs of Tokyo look beautiful. It seemed that he'd done so simply by depicting them, by showing them as worth looking at.

walrus01 5y ago

If you want to see a lot of captchas, try browsing with Firefox mobile with ublock origin installed. It's sad how many people design for 100% chrome. To the point that being a stock Firefox user agent that doesn't receive all ads shows up as if you're a bot scraping the site.

judge2020 5y ago
It all comes down to how lazy (or perhaps cost-conscious) the developers of the website are. Most traffic is Chrome and Safari, so running those two tests covers nearly 85% of users[0] and most other browsers like Firefox make an effort to fix incompatibilities with Chrome. It’s the same for captchas - most people aren’t running in anonymous mode, and when they are, their IP is usually part of a major ISP and thus reputation can be partially assumed by the IP instead of browser cookie. It often doesn’t make sense to spend extra money just so to appease something like 5-10% of internet users (and might be less than 1% of a company’s actual customer base). 0: https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/
- walrus01 5y ago
  One could have written the same thing about internet explorer in 2001 or so. History repeats itself.

derefr 5y ago

> The one exception is, improbably, palm trees. I keep on getting CAPTCHAs asking me to recognize palm trees. I have no idea what’s going on there! Did, like, a Waymo car once slam into a palm tree? Palm trees look kind of like street signs, and show up in places street signs also show up. To recognize street signs, an AI needs both examples of street signs, and examples of things that look like street signs, but aren't.

rajacombinator 5y ago

>dude you need to power the Google botnet. it’s for security. Yea that’s depressing.

human 5y ago

If you get depressed by captcha images, your life is too easy.

dredmorbius 5y ago

My RECAPTCHA policy: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371588129861216 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371588129861216

dirtyid 5y ago

I wish there was more captcha options. I'm tired of training autonomous driving in North America.

backtoyoujim 5y ago

Are Captchas a version of Proof of Work ?

danellis 5y ago

> I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems. Then you are free to not use the service that you are not paying for.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

playguardin 5y ago
What's wrong with scraping?

dougSF70 5y ago

Imagine that self-driving cars are a long way off from being reality because the AI isn't quite good enough to distinguish and classify objects in corner cases - of which there must be numerous. This would suggest these captcha tests are going to be with us for a long while too.

srswtf123 5y ago

The thing that gets me is this: I don’t want to train AI for free. If you’re going to train models using our input, then you need to distribute the results as public good and make no profit from it.

moonbug 5y ago

yes the pictures are dismal, but that's the reality of suburban America.

jmclnx 5y ago

Captcha has made me move to DucDuckGo, I hope Google is listening <<<<

wombatmobile 5y ago

> Why are these photos so depressing? What is it about their composition that is so enervating? If the causality was a property of the images, those questions would have definitive answers. But our emotions are not transmitted to us by inanimate objects or images. They come from within our psyches. There is an element of choice to what we feel. If there wasn’t, we would be zombies, or machines, or vulnerable imbeciles who could be overcome by an enemy combatant who would need no gun, knife or club - just a picture of a traffic light.

jollybean 5y ago

It's frustrating because they represent the actual drudgery of real life. It's not pretty, there's no beauty filter, there's no composition etc.. It shows that we live mostly in bits of fairly ugly industrial landscape.

legohead 5y ago

failed one of these recently because it asked me to click on "bicycles", but there were a lot of motorcycles, and I didn't click on those... so I failed

ctdonath 5y ago

Captcha: prove you’re not a robot by teaching robots how to prove they’re not robots.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

z0ltan 5y ago

It's always been blatantly obvious that captchas and its variants were primarily to get free work out of people to train their A.Is, not for anything else really.

yepthatsreality 5y ago

Use the audio puzzle and type incorrect words that sound right.

mlang23 5y ago

CAPTCHAs are discriminating. They fail at what their name suggests they do occasionally. Which means they dehumanize humans. There are humans without eyesight, you know? And some of these have bad hearing. The web has decided that it is OK to classify these people are computers. And nobody cares because the solution is so convenient. Well, thats how society works.

Freak_NL 5y ago
They do have somewhat accessible alternative modes. Give them a try (these are even more dystopic — try having it read out some numbers for you to type).

factorialboy 5y ago

How much does Google owe us for training their AI all these years?

jpalomaki 5y ago

Maybe the boring explanation is that street view scenery is the largest, fit for purpose dataset that Google actually owns and can safely use for this purpose.

Radim 5y ago

"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines." — God Emperor of Dune Frank Herbert was a genius.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

so essentially the Captcha is the AI's sneaky way of getting humans to understand them, once we understand them the process of assimilation is at least 30% of the way done. Next - the hardware fittings. Actually - if I was the AI trying to assimilate the humans I would start selling a google glasses type thing that allows you to skip captchas by automatically informing the captcha that a human is watching - watching through the AI's eyes.

sveniv 5y ago

We don’t know what this training data might be used for in the future, especially considering it could be stolen. I always feel uneasy clicking on school busses, it feels too similar to a shoot em up game where I have to eliminate all of them, then “verify” when I’m done. Perhaps the interface is too similar to a scope on a weapon overlaid on everyday images.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

Sometimes the captcha says I'm wrong even though I'm write because it got something very similar to something else. Then you end up having to think like an AI, which is super weird

HalfEye 5y ago

why do they keep using captchas when they so obviously discriminate against visually handicapped but people who can still easily use computers? Don't programmers know there are laws against that? I know they don't care but to choose as it as a means of proof of humanity - something that's illegal in many countries - seems so backward of technology.

EyeTheGreat 5y ago

Friedeye 5y ago

Why do they keep using captchas when this test of humanity has such a major flaw and there are so many people with this degree of visual disability who can still easily use computers? Don't programmers know there are laws against that? I know they don't care but to choose it as a means of proof of humanity - a test considered illegal in many countries - seems truly backward of technology.