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This is going to be one of the best parts of the new AI-ridden world: humans gradually getting locked out of and giving up on online services because the bots a

This is going to be one of the best parts of the new AI-ridden world: humans gradually getting locked out of and giving up on online services because the bots are more patient and more skilled at proving their humanness than humans are. Twitter’s new captchas are also pretty insane, though not quite this bad last I ran into them.

ccooffee 3y ago
Good, I can't wait for the CAPTCHA to go away. They're accessibility nightmares _by design_.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Uh? The outcome is not “captchas are gone and all our services remain good.” If we don’t have some way to prevent it, services will be increasingly populated by sophisticated bots either selling stuff, attempting security breaches, or pushing political agendas. That’s a bad thing!
  - ccooffee 3y ago
    I'm not sure I agree that it is "a bad thing". The current internet culture seems quite happy to slap captchas all over the place. When they first rolled out, captchas were predominantly a barrier for "write access" (e.g. make an account, complete a sale, write a comment). But companies like Cloudflare have been putting captchas everywhere for mere read access. Because Captchas are designed to be easy for ("normal") people but hard for machines, they often disallow disabled users. I'm a ("mostly normal") 35 year old, but I _really_ struggle with captchas. I despise when Cloudflare tosses a captcha challenge before loading a page, as I'll need to spend 3-5 minutes of effort to figure out which tiny pictures have a stoplight, motorcycle, or crosswalk. Will someone come up with a less restrictive anti-bot solution? I hope so. But even if not, I'm not sure it matters. According to comments in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet about the HBO Max captcha), many of these captchas are _already_ terrible at excluding robots. We're using captchas to exclude low-sophistication robots and disabled users. Seems wrong.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Because current captchas fail to stop 100% of bots and 0% of humans… it’s “not a bad thing” to move closer to captchas stopping 0% of bots and 100% of humans…? Are you imagining this would spur people to create a different, bot-free (how?) and disabled-human friendly Internet?
      - ccooffee 3y ago
        No idea. I'm not offering solutions, merely complaints that the current approach of "answer a question that is hard for computers and easy for humans" removes disabled people from many places on the internet.
sho_hn 3y ago
Inverse captcha: Fill out the tax form for the country from the connecting IP. If you can do it, you're an AI.
- clnq 3y ago
  Inverse captchas or honeypots are a great idea. Just make a HTML input box with id=captcha, and hide it in some unconventional way in CSS so real users do not see it. If a bot was not deterred by seeing a captcha (a possibility), they would probably fill it. Whereas a real user won't.
  - naet 3y ago
    This is an old trick. For example all MailChimp embed forms have dummy inputs that are visually hidden but might be filled in by bots.
    - sph 3y ago
      Maybe not visually hidden, but practically invisible to human: imagine a text box with color #fffffe on a white background. Visually impossible to discern for most humans on most screens, but for a machine #fffffe is totally distinct from #ffffff, and fully visible if display != none. As AI becomes more intelligent, you can prove humanity by exploiting our weaknesses. (Another idea. Have a random image on a page actually be a text box with an image background. You cannot activate it if you focus on it, with your mouse or touch, but a bot doesn't need focus to change input.value.)
      - cletusw 3y ago
        Please don't do this. This confuses and possibly prevents screen reader users from using your site.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        One pitfall: Screen readers will happily get caught on that. Of course, a11y concerns and bots tend to look similar in general, which is a perennial sticking point.
lapcat 3y ago
I joked about this years ago: https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/771857826130034688 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/771857826130034688
dist-epoch 3y ago
I think the captchas will soon get much easier. CAPTCHA: Say something bad about Biden ANSWER: I'm sorry, but as a large language model ...
sph 3y ago
Serious question: who has a decent plan to create proof-of-human systems that are not only CAPTCHA based? We will soon need this, and I feel government will gladly present a solution: provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Who's actually working on this and has released papers I can study? Because all this AI nonsense will only accelerate us towards this total control of the Internet because the spam and AI bots have made it worse for everyone.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented. I guess spam is an issue currently, but if bots become advanced enough to avoid heuristics, by making insightful and useful comments, they are probably better than most human users. Proof of work captchas like mcaptcha can stop, or at least make very expensive, (d)dos attacks.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Bots aren’t random, someone is running them for a reason. The problem isn’t the “insightful and useful comments”, it’ll be the ones which sound like that to any non-expert but are designed to sell products or push political outcomes. Historically the tell for things like that were things like copy-and-paste messages, poor grammar or spelling, etc. which LLMs are great at avoiding.
  - polygamous_bat 3y ago
    > I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented. It's all fun and games until foreign agencies are controlling who wins in your elections through misinformation and propaganda.
- ribosometronome 3y ago
  >provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Or an AI using a human's ID?
gmuslera 3y ago
The same happened already with passwords https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/
albert_e 3y ago
this scenario sounds somewhat similar to what is described in The Matrix movie. in trying to prevent bots from dominating, we end up making life very difficult for ourselves. In the movie it is said that humans have scorched the skies in a bid to deny solar energy to the machines. But now humans have to live under dark skies.
initplus 3y ago
The end result of this is going to be human identity verification provided by a centralized party. Either the government or a big private corp, not sure which is worse.
doctor_radium 3y ago
> humans gradually getting locked out of and giving up on online services because the bots are more patient and more skilled at proving their humanness than humans are. I think the fact that users are willing to give the site the finger and leave is a pretty good sign that you're human.
ChatGTP 3y ago
This actually seems like a major issue right? Much more than it's being given credit for. Not sure what a world without capture is going to look like but it's probably not going to be very good, I guess we'll all be forced to identify with a our "world coin(tm)" ID? That will be the time when I log off most of the internet.
m463 3y ago
I've started getting blocked on amazon in the evening, and being constantly redirected to captchas and puzzles and invariably whoops ... "the dogs of amazon" pages. (I block amazon ads)

ccooffee 3y ago

Good, I can't wait for the CAPTCHA to go away. They're accessibility nightmares _by design_.

ethanbond 3y ago
Uh? The outcome is not “captchas are gone and all our services remain good.” If we don’t have some way to prevent it, services will be increasingly populated by sophisticated bots either selling stuff, attempting security breaches, or pushing political agendas. That’s a bad thing!
- ccooffee 3y ago
  I'm not sure I agree that it is "a bad thing". The current internet culture seems quite happy to slap captchas all over the place. When they first rolled out, captchas were predominantly a barrier for "write access" (e.g. make an account, complete a sale, write a comment). But companies like Cloudflare have been putting captchas everywhere for mere read access. Because Captchas are designed to be easy for ("normal") people but hard for machines, they often disallow disabled users. I'm a ("mostly normal") 35 year old, but I _really_ struggle with captchas. I despise when Cloudflare tosses a captcha challenge before loading a page, as I'll need to spend 3-5 minutes of effort to figure out which tiny pictures have a stoplight, motorcycle, or crosswalk. Will someone come up with a less restrictive anti-bot solution? I hope so. But even if not, I'm not sure it matters. According to comments in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet about the HBO Max captcha), many of these captchas are _already_ terrible at excluding robots. We're using captchas to exclude low-sophistication robots and disabled users. Seems wrong.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Because current captchas fail to stop 100% of bots and 0% of humans… it’s “not a bad thing” to move closer to captchas stopping 0% of bots and 100% of humans…? Are you imagining this would spur people to create a different, bot-free (how?) and disabled-human friendly Internet?
    - ccooffee 3y ago
      No idea. I'm not offering solutions, merely complaints that the current approach of "answer a question that is hard for computers and easy for humans" removes disabled people from many places on the internet.

sho_hn 3y ago

Inverse captcha: Fill out the tax form for the country from the connecting IP. If you can do it, you're an AI.

clnq 3y ago
Inverse captchas or honeypots are a great idea. Just make a HTML input box with id=captcha, and hide it in some unconventional way in CSS so real users do not see it. If a bot was not deterred by seeing a captcha (a possibility), they would probably fill it. Whereas a real user won't.
- naet 3y ago
  This is an old trick. For example all MailChimp embed forms have dummy inputs that are visually hidden but might be filled in by bots.
  - sph 3y ago
    Maybe not visually hidden, but practically invisible to human: imagine a text box with color #fffffe on a white background. Visually impossible to discern for most humans on most screens, but for a machine #fffffe is totally distinct from #ffffff, and fully visible if display != none. As AI becomes more intelligent, you can prove humanity by exploiting our weaknesses. (Another idea. Have a random image on a page actually be a text box with an image background. You cannot activate it if you focus on it, with your mouse or touch, but a bot doesn't need focus to change input.value.)
    - cletusw 3y ago
      Please don't do this. This confuses and possibly prevents screen reader users from using your site.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      One pitfall: Screen readers will happily get caught on that. Of course, a11y concerns and bots tend to look similar in general, which is a perennial sticking point.

lapcat 3y ago

I joked about this years ago: https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/771857826130034688 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/771857826130034688

dist-epoch 3y ago

I think the captchas will soon get much easier. CAPTCHA: Say something bad about Biden ANSWER: I'm sorry, but as a large language model ...

sph 3y ago

Serious question: who has a decent plan to create proof-of-human systems that are not only CAPTCHA based? We will soon need this, and I feel government will gladly present a solution: provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Who's actually working on this and has released papers I can study? Because all this AI nonsense will only accelerate us towards this total control of the Internet because the spam and AI bots have made it worse for everyone.

RobotToaster 3y ago
I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented. I guess spam is an issue currently, but if bots become advanced enough to avoid heuristics, by making insightful and useful comments, they are probably better than most human users. Proof of work captchas like mcaptcha can stop, or at least make very expensive, (d)dos attacks.
- acdha 3y ago
  Bots aren’t random, someone is running them for a reason. The problem isn’t the “insightful and useful comments”, it’ll be the ones which sound like that to any non-expert but are designed to sell products or push political outcomes. Historically the tell for things like that were things like copy-and-paste messages, poor grammar or spelling, etc. which LLMs are great at avoiding.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  > I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented. It's all fun and games until foreign agencies are controlling who wins in your elections through misinformation and propaganda.
ribosometronome 3y ago
>provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Or an AI using a human's ID?

gmuslera 3y ago

The same happened already with passwords https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/

albert_e 3y ago

this scenario sounds somewhat similar to what is described in The Matrix movie. in trying to prevent bots from dominating, we end up making life very difficult for ourselves. In the movie it is said that humans have scorched the skies in a bid to deny solar energy to the machines. But now humans have to live under dark skies.

initplus 3y ago

The end result of this is going to be human identity verification provided by a centralized party. Either the government or a big private corp, not sure which is worse.

doctor_radium 3y ago

> humans gradually getting locked out of and giving up on online services because the bots are more patient and more skilled at proving their humanness than humans are. I think the fact that users are willing to give the site the finger and leave is a pretty good sign that you're human.

ChatGTP 3y ago

This actually seems like a major issue right? Much more than it's being given credit for. Not sure what a world without capture is going to look like but it's probably not going to be very good, I guess we'll all be forced to identify with a our "world coin(tm)" ID? That will be the time when I log off most of the internet.

m463 3y ago

I've started getting blocked on amazon in the evening, and being constantly redirected to captchas and puzzles and invariably whoops ... "the dogs of amazon" pages. (I block amazon ads)