I’m not sure this is solvable, but even if it is, I’m not sure its a good problem to work on.
Why, fundamentally, do we care if the user is a bot or a human? Is it just because bots don’t buy things they see advertised, so we don’t want to waste server cycles and bandwidth on them?
Whatever the reasons for wanting to distinguish bots from humans, perhaps there are better means than CAPTCHA, focused on the reasons rather than bots vs. humans.
For example, if you don’t want to serve a web page to bots because you don’t make any money from them, a micropayments system could allow a human to pay you $0.001/page or so—enough to cover the marginal cost of serving the page. If a bot is willing to pay that much—let them.
I get what you mean, if an AI can do things as well as the human, why block it?
I’m not really sure how that would apply in most cases however. For example bot swarms on social media platforms is a problem that has received a lot of attention lately. Of course, solving a captcha is not as deterring as charging let’s say 8 usd per month, but I still think captchas could be useful in a bot deterring strategy.
Is this a useful problem work on? I understand that for most people it probably isn’t, but personally I find it fun, and it might even be possible to start a SAAS business to make money that could be spent on useful things (although this seems unlikely).
$8/month (or other small charges) can solve a lot of problems.
Note that some of the early CAPTCHA algorithms solved two problems at once—both distinguishing bots from humans, and helping improve OCR technology by harnessing human vision. (I’m not sure exactly how it worked—either you were voting on the interpretation of an image of some text, or you were training a neural network).
Such dual-use CAPTCHA seems worthwhile, if it helps crowdsource solving some other worthwhile problem (better OCR does seem worthwhile).
I’m not sure this is solvable, but even if it is, I’m not sure its a good problem to work on.
Why, fundamentally, do we care if the user is a bot or a human? Is it just because bots don’t buy things they see advertised, so we don’t want to waste server cycles and bandwidth on them?
Whatever the reasons for wanting to distinguish bots from humans, perhaps there are better means than CAPTCHA, focused on the reasons rather than bots vs. humans.
For example, if you don’t want to serve a web page to bots because you don’t make any money from them, a micropayments system could allow a human to pay you $0.001/page or so—enough to cover the marginal cost of serving the page. If a bot is willing to pay that much—let them.
I get what you mean, if an AI can do things as well as the human, why block it?
I’m not really sure how that would apply in most cases however. For example bot swarms on social media platforms is a problem that has received a lot of attention lately. Of course, solving a captcha is not as deterring as charging let’s say 8 usd per month, but I still think captchas could be useful in a bot deterring strategy.
Is this a useful problem work on? I understand that for most people it probably isn’t, but personally I find it fun, and it might even be possible to start a SAAS business to make money that could be spent on useful things (although this seems unlikely).
$8/month (or other small charges) can solve a lot of problems.
Note that some of the early CAPTCHA algorithms solved two problems at once—both distinguishing bots from humans, and helping improve OCR technology by harnessing human vision. (I’m not sure exactly how it worked—either you were voting on the interpretation of an image of some text, or you were training a neural network).
Such dual-use CAPTCHA seems worthwhile, if it helps crowdsource solving some other worthwhile problem (better OCR does seem worthwhile).