[kernelbandwidth]

This is supposedly a feature and not a bug of CAPTCHA, at least according to the apocryphal story John Lafferty told me. IIRC, this was at CMU so he must have been referring to the 2003 CAPTCHA claim by von Ahn et al. The idea was primarily to stop spammers, but also secondarily to make them more useful. The argument was that if spammers managed to "break" CAPTCHA, then whatever technology was used to break it would necessarily be a useful (compared to 2003 knowledge) advance in AI, so it was a win-win whether it stopped spammers or just made them do free out-of-band research.

[username223]

Yes, back in the day, CAPTCHA was a good way to use human time trying to submit forms to both block spam-bots, and do useful work (e.g. label training data). This worked well when ML was bad at image recognition, but that's no longer the case. Unfortunately, as ML got better at the tasks, CAPTCHAs forced humans to do more work, and we're now at a point where either the machines are better, or it's not worth the humans' time. If your site has a CAPTCHA, there's a good chance I'll just close the tab and move on.

[_0w8t]

If one uses Google's capture, then most likely that capture already has enough data on you, so it doesn't ask anything.

[harshreality]

Greetings, comrade! I see by your comment that you don't often use VPNs, or tor, and even limit your use of incognito/private tabs[1]. Thank you for being a good citizen! Carry on!

/s NNAlphabetPopulationSentimentBOT 0.1alpha-3zulu-beta-5-mark20

[1] We are getting better all the time at tracking activity in private/incognito tabs, but there are still some gaps particularly when users manually enable extensions like ublock in incognito mode. This hurts the user's experience on the web, and we suggest only enabling google extensions in incognito. It's incognito even without privacy-enhancing extensions. We promise. Nevermind that we know enough about you to let you bypass our captchas.

[_0w8t]

Brave is my primary browser running under Firejail. I do not use private tabs. Rather I just delete all browser files time-to-time. After that Google capture do ask questions but after a couple of times it stops.

[mulmen]

What a ...relief?

[_0w8t]

I had to put Google capture on a site running a forum with about 300 daily visitors. Otherwise number of bots that passed through email confirmation and tried to write comments with ads was 20-30 daily. It removed all bots.

[username223]

I can't find the link, but I remember someone doing some experiments awhile back suggesting that the "I'm a human" checkbox just checks if you have Google's tracking "PREF" cookie installed. I don't remember if there seemed to be device fingerprinting involved as well. In any case, if I use one of those and don't have to click on street signs, I know it's a sign I should tidy up my browser state.

[AdamJacobMuller]

For whatever reason, probably my use of AdBlock/uBlock/PrivacyBadger/Disconnect/etc, I get the captcha 100% of the time from google.

[_0w8t]

I use Brave as my browser. It blocks ads much better than extensions. In addition my primary search engine is DuckDuckGo. Still most Google captures do not ask questions.

[pixl97]

In this argument, how do we keep AI from destroying the internet?

[username223]

If by "the internet" you mean "the ad-supported web," then we can't, and that may not be a bad thing.