[cma]

The rise of captchas on regular content, no longer just for posting content, could ruin this. Cloudflare and other companies have set things up to go through a few hand selected scrapers and only they will be able to offer AI browsing and research services.

[tptacek]

I think the opposite problem is going to occur with captchas for whatever it's worth: LLMs are going to obsolete them. It's an arms race where the defender has a huge constraint the attacker doesn't (pissing off real users); in that way, it's kind of like the opposite dynamics that password hashes exploit.

[anon373839]

I’m not sure about that. There’s a lot of runway left for obstacles that are easy for humans and hard/impossible for AI, such as direct manipulation puzzles. (AI models have latency that would be impossible to mask.) On the other hand, a11y needs do limit what can be lawfully deployed…

[jgrahamc]

There’s a lot of runway left for obstacles that are easy for humans and hard/impossible for AI, such as direct manipulation puzzles.

That's irrelevant. Humans totally hate CAPTCHAs and they are an accessibility and cultural nightmare. Just forget about them. Forget about making better ones, forget about what AI can and can't do. We moved on from CAPTCHAs for all those reasons. Everyone else needs to.

[nerdralph]

Agreed. When I open a link and get a Cloudflare CAPTCHA I just close the tab.

[jgrahamc]

We eliminated all CAPTCHA use at Cloudflare in September 2023: https://blog.cloudflare.com/turnstile-ga/

[nerdralph]

OK, what you now call turnstyle. If I get one of those screens I just close the tab rather than wait several seconds for the algorithm to run and give me a green checkbox to proceed.

[pixl97]

>AI models have latency

So do humans, or can my friend with cerebral palsy not use the internet any longer?

[anon373839]

Totally different type of latency. A person with a motor disability dragging a puzzle piece with their finger will look very different from an AI model being called frame by frame.

[pixl97]

Round 2: Begin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnXp6Saa8Y

[anon373839]

That's a great video. To be clear, I'm not defending Captchas - I just don't know if I believe they're dead yet.

[cma]

Cloudflare is more than captchas, it's centralized monitoring of them too: what do you think happens when your research assistant solves 50 captchas in 5 min from your home IP? It has to slow down to human research speeds.

[AznHisoka]

What about Cloudflare itself? It might constitute an abuse of sorts of their leadership position, but couldn’t they dominate the AI research/agent market if they wanted? (Or maybe that’s what you were implying too)