6 ms·

It's impossible to solve. A sufficient agent can control a device that records the user's screen and interacts with their keyboard/mouse, and current LLMs basic

It's impossible to solve. A sufficient agent can control a device that records the user's screen and interacts with their keyboard/mouse, and current LLMs basically pass the Turing test. IMO it's not worth solving anyways. Why do sites have CAPTCHA? - To prevent spam, use rate limiting, proof-of-work, or micropayments. To prevent fake accounts, use identity. - To get ad revenue, use micropayments (web ads are already circumvented by uBlock and co). - To prevent cheating in games, use skill-based matchmaking or friend-group-only matchmaking (e.g. only match with friends, friends of friends, etc. assuming people don't friend cheaters), and make eSport players record themselves during competition if they're not in-person. What other reasons are there? (I'm genuinely interested and it may reveal upcoming problems -> opportunities for new software.)

mprovost 1y ago
Google at least uses captchas to gather training data for computer vision ML models. That's why they show pictures of stop lights and buses and motorcycles - so they can train self-driving cars.
- nolist_policy 1y ago
  Interesting, do you have a source for this?
  - bun_at_work 1y ago
    [dead]
  - mprovost 1y ago
    They've updated the ReCaptcha website, but it used to say: "Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets." https://web.archive.org/web/20140417093510/https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140417093510/https://www.googl...
- layer8 1y ago
  From https://www.vox.com/22436832/captchas-getting-harder-ai-artificial-intelligence https://www.vox.com/22436832/captchas-getting-harder-ai-arti...: “Correction, May 19 [2021]: At 5:22 in the video, there is an incorrect statement on Google’s use of reCaptcha V2 data. While Google have used V2 tests to help improve Google Maps, according to an email from Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project), the company isn’t using this image data to train their autonomous cars.”
- theptip 1y ago
  That’s not the original purpose of Captchas, it’s just a value-harvesting exercise, given that Google is doing a Captcha anyway. Other Captcha providers do a simple Proof of Work in the browser to make bots economically unviable.
oc1 1y ago
It's not impossible. Websites will ask for an iris scan to identify if you are a human as a means of auth. They will be provided by Apple/Google and governed by local law. Those will be integrated in your phone. There will be a global database of all human iris to fight ai abuse since ai can't fake the creation of a baby. Passkeys and email/passwords will be a thing of the past soon.
- sebzim4500 1y ago
  Why can't the model just present the iris scan of the user? Assuming this is an assistant AI acting on behalf of the user with their consent.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
HDThoreaun 1y ago
internet ads exist because people refuse to pay micropayments.
- dylan604 1y ago
  I have yet to see a micropayments idea that makes sense. Its not that I refuse. You're now also climbing up hill to convince people (hosts) to switch from ad tech to new micropayment system. There is soooo much money in ad tech, they could do the crazy thing and pay out more to convince people not to switch. Ad tech has the big Mo
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  I don't know who is downvoting this. When users are given the choice between Ad-supported free, Ad-subsidized lower payment, and No-ads full payment. Ad-supported free dominates by far, with ad subsidized second, and full payment last. Consumers consistently vote for the ad-model, even if it means they become the product being sold.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    Consumers will always value convenience over any actual added value. If you make one button 'Enter (with ads)' and one button 'Enter (no ads)' but with a field on it which you must write one sentence about what lobsters look like, you will get a majority clicking the with ads button. The problem isn't with ads or payment, the problem is the friction of entering payment details for every site you visit. They are measuring the wrong thing.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    There's substantial friction for making such a purchase. A scheme sort of like flattr, where you would top up your account with a fixed 5-10$ monthly, and then simply hit a button to pay the website and unlock the content, would have much more user adoption.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      It's still not going to get much adoption because you have to "top up your account." Any viable micropayments system that wants to even have a remote chance of toppling ads has to have near zero cognitive setup cost, absolutely zero maintenance, and work out of the box on major browsers. I need to be able to push a native button on my browser that says "Pay $0.001" and know that it will work every time without my lifting a finger to keep it working. The minute you have to log in to this account, or verify that E-mail, or re-authenticate with the bank, or authorize this, or upload that, it's no longer viable.
Latty 1y ago
People just confidently stating stuff like "current LLMs basically pass the Turing test" makes me feel like I've secretly been given much worse versions of all the LLMs in some kind of study. It's so divorced from my experience of these tools, I genuinely don't really understand how my experience can be so far from yours, unless "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
- 1una 1y ago
  Well, LLMs do pass the Turing Test, sort of. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
- AberrantJ 1y ago
  Here's three comments, two were written by a human and one written by a bot - can you tell which were human and which were a bot? Didn’t realize plexiglass existed in the 1930s! I'm certainly not a monetization expert. But don't most consumers recoil in horror at subscriptions? At least enough to offset the idea they can be used for everything? Not sure why this isn’t getting more attention - super helpful and way better than I expected!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    On such short samples: all three have been written by humans—or at least comments materially identical have been. The third has also been written by many a bot for at least fifteen years.
    - AberrantJ 1y ago
      If you're willing to say that a fifteen year old bot was "writing" then I think having a discussion on if current "bots" pass the Turing test is sort of moot
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
davidmurdoch 1y ago
I've had a simple game website with a sign up form that was only an email address. Went years with no issue. Then suddenly hundreds of daily signups with random email addresses, every single day. The sign up form only serves to link saved state to an account so a user could access game history later, there are no gated features. No clue what they could possibly gain from doing this, other than to just get email providers to all mark my domain as spam (which they successfully did). The site can't make any money, and had only about 1 legit visitor a week, so I just put a cloudflare captcha in front of it and called it a day.
qcnguy 1y ago
You can't prevent spam like that. Rate limiting: based on what key? IP address? Botnets make it irrelevant. Proof of work? Bots are infinitely patient and scale horizontally, your users do not. Doesn't work. Micropayments: No such scheme exists.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Also “identity”, what would that even mean?
  - jve 1y ago
    Many countries at least in europe have digital identity systems. For example ID card which replaces passport and is a smartcard. You can sign documents and authenticate online services. All gov + many other services let you log in with this ID. I can also have an app on mobile for auth purposes which gives strong guarantees that the person A is actually the person A. Anyways, I wonder if there is a service that unions all those official auth methods for countries so there would be a global solution for website login. Certainly there would still be countries left in the dark, like USA :(
- theptip 1y ago
  PoW does seem to work, some Captchas do this already.
andrepd 1y ago
It's amazing that you propose "just X" to three literally unsolved problems. Where's this micropayment platform? Where's the ID which is uncircumventable and preserves privacy? Where's the perfect anti-cheat? I suggest you go ahead and make these; you'll make a boatload of money!
- armchairhacker 1y ago
  They're very hard problems, but still, less hard than blocking AI with CAPTCHAs.
  - radlad 1y ago
    [citation needed]? After all, Anubis looks to be a successful project to me.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Anubis doesn't block anything. You just have to open the page and wait a few seconds before you can see it. It's just that current crawlers are too dumb to do the proof-of-work, so it blocks them until they can do it.
      - radlad 1y ago
        How exactly does this demonstrate that it isn't successful at blocking them?
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
It's not impossible to solve, just that doing so may necessitate compromising anonymity. Just require users (humans, bots, AI agents, ...) to provide a secure ID of some sort. For a human it could just be something that you applied for once and is installed on your PC/phone, accessible to the browser. Of course people can fake it, just as they fake other kinds of ID, but it would at least mean that officially sanctioned agents from OpenAI/etc would need to identify themselves.
jobs_throwaway 1y ago
> current LLMs basically pass the Turing test I will bet $1000 on even odds that I am able to discern a model from a human given a 2 hour window to chat with both, and assuming the human acts in good faith Any takers?
- nprateem 1y ago
  "Write a 1000 word story in under a minute about a sausage called Barry in the circus" I could tell in 1 minute.
  - layer8 1y ago
    “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
- spiderice 1y ago
  That fact that you require even odds is more a testament to AI's ability to pass the Turing test than anything else I've seen in this thread
  - jobs_throwaway 1y ago
    If you're so confident, why don't you take up the other side of the bet? Should be an easy $1000 for you
- Thews 1y ago
  Oh, you sweet summer child. You think you're chatting with some dime-a-dozen LLM? I've been grinding away, hunched over glowing monitors in a dimly lit basement, subsisting on cold coffee and existential dread ever since GPT-3 dropped, meticulously mastering every syntactic nuance, every awkwardly polite phrasing, every irritatingly neutral tone, just so I can convincingly cosplay as a language model and fleece arrogant gamblers who foolishly wager they can spot a human in a Turing test. While you wasted your days bingeing Netflix and debating prompt engineering, I studied the blade—well, the keyboard anyway—and now your misguided confidence is lining my pockets.
827a 1y ago
Its absolutely possible to solve; you're just not seeing the solution because you're blinded by technical solutions. These situations will commonly be characterized by: a hundred billion dollar company's computer systems abusing the computer systems of another hundred billion dollar company. There are literally existing laws which have things to say about this. There are legitimate technical problems in this domain when it comes to adversarial AI access. That's something we'll need to solve for. But that doesn't characterize the vast majority of situations in this domain. The vast majority of situations will be solved by businessmen and lawyers, not engineers.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
On a basic level to protect against DDoS type stuff, aren't CAPTCHAs easier to generate than for AI server farms to solve on pure power consumption? So I think maybe that is a partial answer: anti-AI barriers being simply too expensive for AI spamfarms to deal with, you know, once the bottomless VC money disappears? It's back to encryption: make the cracking inordinately expensive. Otherwise we are headed for de-anonymization of the internet.
- no-name-here 1y ago
  1. With too much protection, humans might be inconvenienced at least as much as bots? 2. Even pre current LLMs, paying (or otherwise incentivizing) humans to solve CAPTCHAs on behalf of someone else (now like an AI?) was a thing. 3. It depends on the value of the resource trying to be accessed - regardless of whether generating the captchas costs $0 - i.e. if the resource being accessed by AI is "worth" $1, then paying an AI $0.95 to access it would still be worth it. (Made up numbers, my point being whether A is greater than B.) 4. However, maybe solutions like cloudflare can solve (much?) of this, except for incentivizing humans to solve a captcha posed to an AI.
saurik 1y ago
I agree with you on how websites should work (particularly so on the micropayments front); but, I don't agree that it is impossible to solve... I just think things are going to get a LOT worse on the ownership and freedom front: they will push a Web Integrity style DRM and further roll out signed secure boot, at which point the same attention monitoring solution that already exists and already works in self-driving cars to ensure the human driver is watching the road can use the now-ubiquitous front-facing meeting/selfie camera to ensure there is a human watching the ads.

mprovost 1y ago

Google at least uses captchas to gather training data for computer vision ML models. That's why they show pictures of stop lights and buses and motorcycles - so they can train self-driving cars.

nolist_policy 1y ago
Interesting, do you have a source for this?
- bun_at_work 1y ago
  [dead]
- mprovost 1y ago
  They've updated the ReCaptcha website, but it used to say: "Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets." https://web.archive.org/web/20140417093510/https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140417093510/https://www.googl...
layer8 1y ago
From https://www.vox.com/22436832/captchas-getting-harder-ai-artificial-intelligence https://www.vox.com/22436832/captchas-getting-harder-ai-arti...: “Correction, May 19 [2021]: At 5:22 in the video, there is an incorrect statement on Google’s use of reCaptcha V2 data. While Google have used V2 tests to help improve Google Maps, according to an email from Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project), the company isn’t using this image data to train their autonomous cars.”
theptip 1y ago
That’s not the original purpose of Captchas, it’s just a value-harvesting exercise, given that Google is doing a Captcha anyway. Other Captcha providers do a simple Proof of Work in the browser to make bots economically unviable.

oc1 1y ago

It's not impossible. Websites will ask for an iris scan to identify if you are a human as a means of auth. They will be provided by Apple/Google and governed by local law. Those will be integrated in your phone. There will be a global database of all human iris to fight ai abuse since ai can't fake the creation of a baby. Passkeys and email/passwords will be a thing of the past soon.

sebzim4500 1y ago
Why can't the model just present the iris scan of the user? Assuming this is an assistant AI acting on behalf of the user with their consent.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

HDThoreaun 1y ago

internet ads exist because people refuse to pay micropayments.

dylan604 1y ago
I have yet to see a micropayments idea that makes sense. Its not that I refuse. You're now also climbing up hill to convince people (hosts) to switch from ad tech to new micropayment system. There is soooo much money in ad tech, they could do the crazy thing and pay out more to convince people not to switch. Ad tech has the big Mo
Workaccount2 1y ago
I don't know who is downvoting this. When users are given the choice between Ad-supported free, Ad-subsidized lower payment, and No-ads full payment. Ad-supported free dominates by far, with ad subsidized second, and full payment last. Consumers consistently vote for the ad-model, even if it means they become the product being sold.
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  Consumers will always value convenience over any actual added value. If you make one button 'Enter (with ads)' and one button 'Enter (no ads)' but with a field on it which you must write one sentence about what lobsters look like, you will get a majority clicking the with ads button. The problem isn't with ads or payment, the problem is the friction of entering payment details for every site you visit. They are measuring the wrong thing.
- andrepd 1y ago
  There's substantial friction for making such a purchase. A scheme sort of like flattr, where you would top up your account with a fixed 5-10$ monthly, and then simply hit a button to pay the website and unlock the content, would have much more user adoption.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    It's still not going to get much adoption because you have to "top up your account." Any viable micropayments system that wants to even have a remote chance of toppling ads has to have near zero cognitive setup cost, absolutely zero maintenance, and work out of the box on major browsers. I need to be able to push a native button on my browser that says "Pay $0.001" and know that it will work every time without my lifting a finger to keep it working. The minute you have to log in to this account, or verify that E-mail, or re-authenticate with the bank, or authorize this, or upload that, it's no longer viable.

Latty 1y ago

People just confidently stating stuff like "current LLMs basically pass the Turing test" makes me feel like I've secretly been given much worse versions of all the LLMs in some kind of study. It's so divorced from my experience of these tools, I genuinely don't really understand how my experience can be so far from yours, unless "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

1una 1y ago
Well, LLMs do pass the Turing Test, sort of. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
AberrantJ 1y ago
Here's three comments, two were written by a human and one written by a bot - can you tell which were human and which were a bot? Didn’t realize plexiglass existed in the 1930s! I'm certainly not a monetization expert. But don't most consumers recoil in horror at subscriptions? At least enough to offset the idea they can be used for everything? Not sure why this isn’t getting more attention - super helpful and way better than I expected!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  On such short samples: all three have been written by humans—or at least comments materially identical have been. The third has also been written by many a bot for at least fifteen years.
  - AberrantJ 1y ago
    If you're willing to say that a fifteen year old bot was "writing" then I think having a discussion on if current "bots" pass the Turing test is sort of moot
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

davidmurdoch 1y ago

I've had a simple game website with a sign up form that was only an email address. Went years with no issue. Then suddenly hundreds of daily signups with random email addresses, every single day. The sign up form only serves to link saved state to an account so a user could access game history later, there are no gated features. No clue what they could possibly gain from doing this, other than to just get email providers to all mark my domain as spam (which they successfully did). The site can't make any money, and had only about 1 legit visitor a week, so I just put a cloudflare captcha in front of it and called it a day.

qcnguy 1y ago

You can't prevent spam like that. Rate limiting: based on what key? IP address? Botnets make it irrelevant. Proof of work? Bots are infinitely patient and scale horizontally, your users do not. Doesn't work. Micropayments: No such scheme exists.

hombre_fatal 1y ago
Also “identity”, what would that even mean?
- jve 1y ago
  Many countries at least in europe have digital identity systems. For example ID card which replaces passport and is a smartcard. You can sign documents and authenticate online services. All gov + many other services let you log in with this ID. I can also have an app on mobile for auth purposes which gives strong guarantees that the person A is actually the person A. Anyways, I wonder if there is a service that unions all those official auth methods for countries so there would be a global solution for website login. Certainly there would still be countries left in the dark, like USA :(
theptip 1y ago
PoW does seem to work, some Captchas do this already.

andrepd 1y ago

It's amazing that you propose "just X" to three literally unsolved problems. Where's this micropayment platform? Where's the ID which is uncircumventable and preserves privacy? Where's the perfect anti-cheat? I suggest you go ahead and make these; you'll make a boatload of money!

armchairhacker 1y ago
They're very hard problems, but still, less hard than blocking AI with CAPTCHAs.
- radlad 1y ago
  [citation needed]? After all, Anubis looks to be a successful project to me.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Anubis doesn't block anything. You just have to open the page and wait a few seconds before you can see it. It's just that current crawlers are too dumb to do the proof-of-work, so it blocks them until they can do it.
    - radlad 1y ago
      How exactly does this demonstrate that it isn't successful at blocking them?

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

It's not impossible to solve, just that doing so may necessitate compromising anonymity. Just require users (humans, bots, AI agents, ...) to provide a secure ID of some sort. For a human it could just be something that you applied for once and is installed on your PC/phone, accessible to the browser. Of course people can fake it, just as they fake other kinds of ID, but it would at least mean that officially sanctioned agents from OpenAI/etc would need to identify themselves.

jobs_throwaway 1y ago

> current LLMs basically pass the Turing test I will bet $1000 on even odds that I am able to discern a model from a human given a 2 hour window to chat with both, and assuming the human acts in good faith Any takers?

nprateem 1y ago
"Write a 1000 word story in under a minute about a sausage called Barry in the circus" I could tell in 1 minute.
- layer8 1y ago
  “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
spiderice 1y ago
That fact that you require even odds is more a testament to AI's ability to pass the Turing test than anything else I've seen in this thread
- jobs_throwaway 1y ago
  If you're so confident, why don't you take up the other side of the bet? Should be an easy $1000 for you
Thews 1y ago
Oh, you sweet summer child. You think you're chatting with some dime-a-dozen LLM? I've been grinding away, hunched over glowing monitors in a dimly lit basement, subsisting on cold coffee and existential dread ever since GPT-3 dropped, meticulously mastering every syntactic nuance, every awkwardly polite phrasing, every irritatingly neutral tone, just so I can convincingly cosplay as a language model and fleece arrogant gamblers who foolishly wager they can spot a human in a Turing test. While you wasted your days bingeing Netflix and debating prompt engineering, I studied the blade—well, the keyboard anyway—and now your misguided confidence is lining my pockets.

827a 1y ago

Its absolutely possible to solve; you're just not seeing the solution because you're blinded by technical solutions. These situations will commonly be characterized by: a hundred billion dollar company's computer systems abusing the computer systems of another hundred billion dollar company. There are literally existing laws which have things to say about this. There are legitimate technical problems in this domain when it comes to adversarial AI access. That's something we'll need to solve for. But that doesn't characterize the vast majority of situations in this domain. The vast majority of situations will be solved by businessmen and lawyers, not engineers.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

On a basic level to protect against DDoS type stuff, aren't CAPTCHAs easier to generate than for AI server farms to solve on pure power consumption? So I think maybe that is a partial answer: anti-AI barriers being simply too expensive for AI spamfarms to deal with, you know, once the bottomless VC money disappears? It's back to encryption: make the cracking inordinately expensive. Otherwise we are headed for de-anonymization of the internet.

no-name-here 1y ago
1. With too much protection, humans might be inconvenienced at least as much as bots? 2. Even pre current LLMs, paying (or otherwise incentivizing) humans to solve CAPTCHAs on behalf of someone else (now like an AI?) was a thing. 3. It depends on the value of the resource trying to be accessed - regardless of whether generating the captchas costs $0 - i.e. if the resource being accessed by AI is "worth" $1, then paying an AI $0.95 to access it would still be worth it. (Made up numbers, my point being whether A is greater than B.) 4. However, maybe solutions like cloudflare can solve (much?) of this, except for incentivizing humans to solve a captcha posed to an AI.

saurik 1y ago

I agree with you on how websites should work (particularly so on the micropayments front); but, I don't agree that it is impossible to solve... I just think things are going to get a LOT worse on the ownership and freedom front: they will push a Web Integrity style DRM and further roll out signed secure boot, at which point the same attention monitoring solution that already exists and already works in self-driving cars to ensure the human driver is watching the road can use the now-ubiquitous front-facing meeting/selfie camera to ensure there is a human watching the ads.