Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems 271
An anonymous reader writes "With bots getting closer to beating text-based CAPTCHAs for good, New Scientist points out that when they do, OCR technology will at least have advanced. The article goes on to suggest that whatever kind of reverse Turing Test that comes next should be chosen to motivate spammers to solve other pressing AI problems, such as image recognition. Are there any other problems that criminal crowdsourcing could help with?"
a possible idea (Score:4, Insightful)
several years ago 'neural nets' were the big thing and they were thinking that they could make them 'learn' and do useful things.
i always thought that traffic control would be an interesting application. if a computer could look at video of an intersection (and streets leading to the intersection) and figure out where cars were and weren't, you could make traffic lights a lot less annoying.
so our CAPTCHA might be a picture/video of cars and a request to count them?
eric
But will they share their code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spammers are unlikely to share their results with the rest of the world. They're motivated by financial rewards, and there is absolutely no incentive to publicize their methodology in any format.
Not only would the "good guys" learn from it -- and thus potentially defeat the spammers' discovery -- but other spammers would simply steal their work.
Not exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not as optimistic as the New Scientist. Spammers need a really low success rate, as compared to OCR technology which needs a really high success rate.
Capitalism at its best (Score:3, Insightful)
Wherever there is greed, it can be harnessed to actually do some good. I love it!
Re:Busting captchas has not advanced anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
timothy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:True AI (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a reasonably accurate description of the stock market.
Re:True AI (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It was supposed to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, CAPTCHA is radically easier than actual OCR. When cracking a CAPTCHA, achieving a success rate of 5-10% is absolutely fine. Plus, when you submit your answer, you are told whether or not you got it right. With OCR, anything short of high 90's is pretty much useless, and the only feedback available is through manual human intervention, which scales poorly.
Arguably, the only significant OCR advance has been RECAPTCHA, which is just a clever way of making humans do the hard stuff in a way that actually helps, rather than just using makework problems.
It is certainly true that CAPTCHA cracking has advanced considerably, that just doesn't apply too neatly to real OCR problems.
Nice going, you just invented the tiered net (Score:5, Insightful)
What about people for who $50 is a year salary? Congrats, you just split the internet into the rich and the poor. No more accessing the internet from africa from an old PC powered by a donated solar cell. Good job. You probably going to get a nobel price.
Re:How About Using Stereograms? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about people like me who can't seem to get the hang of the darn things? (I personally wouldn't be surprised if they're some kind of elaborate hoax...)
Re:But will they share their code? (Score:1, Insightful)
Knowing that there *is* a solution is often all it takes for bright minds to figure out the same solution.
So once the spammers have cracked it, the AI researchers will figure it out in a few months.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Resiliant software (Score:1, Insightful)
I've noticed this with the last 3 years worth of professional PC repairs and family repairs.
The latest I saw is some Thumbdrive spyware that got triggered on Autorun (NOT Conficker). Pretty damn resilient, to the point I had to reinstall because it caused some services to slow down to a crawl. Symtoms below are usually combined in several ways.
It's hopeless. I have been resorting to reinstalling XP in the last 3 or 4 family repairs These came from people who would visit different pornsites (teen, middle aged and 50+ years old.)
Re:Nice going, you just invented the tiered net (Score:2, Insightful)
What about people for who $50 is a year salary? Congrats, you just split the internet into the rich and the poor. No more accessing the internet from africa from an old PC powered by a donated solar cell. Good job. You probably going to get a nobel price.
Worse than that. Spammers have plenty of cash.
The two solutions also are for two totally separate unrelated problems.
A capcha is only to test if the client is a human or a computer.
It doesn't now, nor ever did, test if the client has money to spend.
In fact, the solution to that persons problem sounds like a reverse-capcha! If the client passes the capcha, they are clearly a lowly human being and shouldn't be allowed to continue into his site. If the capcha is failed on first and second trys, it is probably a bot being run by a spammer, and spammers have lots of cash!
So yes the parents point is 100% correct. You can only replace capchas with another test that actually tests for the same thing.
If all someone wants is only paying customers on their site, a captcha isnt even needed to signup. A credit card where you can place a successful charge using a merchant account is all you need. After all, a human with cash and a spammer with cash both need to be allowed, and a capcha would only prevent bots run by spammers with cash from signing up.
Yet again, stupid greedy website operators, who more than likely add no value to the internet hawking their overpriced crap that everyone else hawks, have just totally taken a new technology and ignored what it really does, then implemented it as wrong as humanly possible.
Auditory scene analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice going, you just invented the tiered net (Score:3, Insightful)
You messed up. CAPCHA is not a test to tell if your viewers have any money. It is just a test if they are a human or computer.
Actually, CAPTCHA is usually a test to see if the viewer can read English. The biggest problem with reCAPTCHA is that all of the words are English.
I can't imagine it'd have anywhere near the success it's seen if it were trying to get you to do OCR for Japanese, or even Polish...