[HN Gopher] OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am...
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot"
verification
Author : joak
Score : 209 points
Date : 2025-07-28 22:46 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| rany_ wrote:
| The only reason why people don't use AI models to solve captchas
| is because paying humans is actually MUCH cheaper.
|
| This is not an advert, I only know about them because it was
| integrated with Invidious at some point: https://anti-
| captcha.com/
|
| > Starting from 0.5USD per 1000 images
| im3w1l wrote:
| There is nothing preventing this from becoming an issue. The
| current internet order is coasting on inertia.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| Why is it an issue that non-humans visit your site?
| diggan wrote:
| Apparently serving HTML + other static content is more
| expensive than ever, probably because people go the most
| expensive routes for hosting their content. Then they
| complain about bots making their websites cost $100/month
| to host, when they could have thrown up Nginx/Caddy on a
| $10/month VPS and basically get the same thing, except they
| would need to learn server maintenance too, so obviously
| outside the question.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I think this is way too true, unfortunately.
|
| I will say this again, but I think lowering the barrier
| to entry has created more problems or issues than it
| solved, if it even solved anything.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 3 reasons basically:
|
| 1. non-humans can create much more content than humans.
| There's a limit to how fast a human can write, a bot is
| basically unlimited. Without captchas, we'd all drown in a
| see of Viagra spam, and the misinformation problem would
| get much worse.
|
| 2. Sometimes the website is actually powered by an
| expensive API, think flight searches for example. Airlines
| are really unhappy when you have too many searches /
| bookings that don't result in a purchase, as they don't
| want to leak their pricing structures to people who will
| exploit them adversarially. This sounds a bit unethical to
| some, but regulating this away would actually cause flight
| prices to go up across the board.
|
| 3. One way searches. E.g. a government registry that lets
| you get the address, phone number and category of a company
| based on its registration number, but one that doesn't let
| you get the phone numbers of all bakeries in NYC for
| marketing purposes. If you make the registry accessible for
| bots, somebody will inevitably turn it into an SQL table
| that allows arbitrary queries.
| p3rls wrote:
| i run a small wiki/image host and for me it's mainly:
|
| 4. they'll knock your server offline for everyone else
| trying to scrape thousands of albums at once while
| copying your users' uploads for their shitty discord bot
| and will be begging for donations the entire time too
| Aurornis wrote:
| If you have a static site with content you want to share
| broadly, nothing is wrong.
|
| It becomes a problem when it's used to spam unwanted
| content faster than your human moderators can come up with.
|
| Someone might bot to scrape your content and repackage it
| on their own site for profit.
|
| The bots might start interacting with your real users,
| making them frustrated and driving them away.
| metalman wrote:
| from "anti captcha" it looks like they are doing as many as
| 1000/sec solves, 60k min, 3.6 million an hour it would be very
| interesting to see exactly how this is bieng
| done?....individuals....teams....semi automation, custom tech?,
| what? are they solving for crims? or fed up people? obviously
| the whole shit show is going to unravel at some point, and as
| the crims and people providing workarounds are highly
| motivated, with a public seathing in frustration, whatever
| comes next, will burn faster
| ACCount36 wrote:
| They're solving for everyone who needs captchas solved.
|
| It's a very old service, active since 00s. Somewhat
| affiliated with cybercrime - much like a lot of "residential
| proxies" and "sink registration SMS" services that serve
| similar purposes. What they're doing isn't illegal, but they
| know not to ask questions.
|
| They used to run entirely on human labor - third world is
| cheap. Now, they have a lot of AI tech in the mix - designed
| to beat specific popular captchas and simple generic
| captchas.
| lan321 wrote:
| Half of their employees seem to be from Venezuela. Makes sense
| considering what they did/do in OSRS to earn a living.
| amelius wrote:
| I want this in my browser, and I'll happily pay $1 per 1000
| uses.
| samschooler wrote:
| Lucky you :)
|
| https://antcpt.com/eng/download/mozilla-firefox.html
| amirhirsch wrote:
| Captcha can detect the same person passing a captcha over and
| over. We shadow-ban to increase the cost of this kind of
| attack.
|
| Source: I wrote the og detection system for hCaptcha
| rany_ wrote:
| This is really interesting. How can you detect when it's the
| same person passing a captcha? I don't think IP addresses are
| of any use here as Anti-Captcha proxies everything to their
| customer's IP address.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I've noticed more websites wanting you to log in. Most surprising
| is how YouTube won't let me watch anything otherwise. Idk if
| related.
| rvnx wrote:
| And if the website contains erotic content (like YouTube), they
| are supposed to lock you and verify your ID. This is why all
| erotic content is getting filtered on X.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| In the UK maybe
| exasperaited wrote:
| And in Texas, which has ~half the population of the UK, and
| in several other US states.
|
| (And if not, because US firms don't take compliance with
| outlying state law seriously)
| exe34 wrote:
| Wait, Twitter is following the law now? I thought Elon was a
| free speech absolutist who only banned things that were
| inconvenient to him?
| johnisgood wrote:
| You can't even read a tweet without logging in.
| Additionally, recently I have noticed I cannot view
| anything on GitHub without logging in first. Why do I need
| to log in to GitHub first to view anything on it? I am sure
| it has nothing to do with adult content. Perhaps it has to
| do with bots?
| kassner wrote:
| For a while now, GitHub doesn't allow you to use the code
| search anonymously, but everything else is still there.
| Rate limits are quite damn low though.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Do you think it has to do with LLMs though? Them
| disallowing anonymous code search?
| frollogaston wrote:
| Pre-MS GitHub didn't have code search at all, and once
| they added it, I think it always required login from the
| start.
| johnisgood wrote:
| What are we referring to as code search? I cannot view
| any pages on GitHub without logging in. I tried to
| reproduce this in a private window but it seems to work,
| which is weird. I was not logged in to GitHub on Windows
| and it wants me to login. It might be the extensions I am
| using (along with an User-Agent switcher). Not sure, I
| would have to check. All I remember is that I was logged
| out on Windows and I could not view ANY page from GitHub
| without logging in, but I can on Linux, tested it in a
| private window. Odd.
| kassner wrote:
| GitHub Code Search was introduced in 2021 and made GA in
| 2023[1][2]. It's an improved version of the previous
| global search (aka across all repositories).
|
| > I cannot view any pages on GitHub without logging in
|
| There must be some sort of IP/browser reputation check
| going on. For Firefox on Mac, I get this on a private
| window:
|
| https://vie.kassner.com.br/assets/ghcs-1.png
|
| I'm not behind CGNAT and GitHub can pretty much assume
| that my IP = my user. The code tab you can't see without
| logging in though.
|
| 1: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-
| code-s... 2:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35863175
| kassner wrote:
| I can't comment on LLMs, but I vaguely remember
| speculations of it being a mixture of AI training and
| trying to keep resource utilization at bay. Even generic
| bots can cause a lot load if you don't have much caching
| in front of it.
| exasperaited wrote:
| X is weaponising it by asking for adult verification for
| things that don't need it and saying "oh we are forced to
| do this" because it angers the Reform-voting meatheads who
| will be voting for the candidates Musk is going to find a
| way to bankroll in 2030, even -- I would guess -- if it
| means breaking UK election law to do it.
|
| He is intent on meddling in UK politics.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Soon after he bought Twitter, it got changed to requiring
| login to do anything at all. Even before that, Twitter was
| super eager to ban new accounts for no reason, while old
| ones seemed to be grandfathered in.
|
| This coincided with tech companies broadly moving to
| profit-taking over growth. Even before LLMs took off,
| everything started locking down. Making a Google account
| used to take nothing, now you need a phone number. It'd be
| wise to sign up for possibly useful free accounts while you
| still can.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I have no idea, but I noticed that you have to login to GitHub
| first before you could view any page. Surely it has nothing to
| do with adult content, right? I think it has to do with LLMs /
| bots.
| Phui3ferubus wrote:
| In case of YT it is likely a mix of multiple reasons. They stop
| playlists on this screen:
| https://www.hollyland.com/blog/tips/why-does-this-the-follow...
| . Apparently music is no longer advertiser friendly. Detecting
| ad-click fraud is easier when users are at least pseudo-
| anonymous. Warnings about "ban for using adblock" is also not
| very effective when people could watch video in new private
| window.
| galuggus wrote:
| can it solve rudecaptcha.xyz ?
| kotaKat wrote:
| ... meanwhile I'll continually be thrown dozens of cognitively
| abusive hCaptchas for no reason and be stuck in a loop of hell
| trying to figure out what they wanted me to solve.
|
| I love this totally normal vision of computing these days. :)
| piva00 wrote:
| Don't forget the fun with Cloudflare's CAPTCHA infinite loop if
| you use Firefox and adblockers/anti-tracking extensions. I sent
| feedback about it, through its own tool, many many times, I've
| tried raising this issue through other channels, it's never
| been fixed.
|
| I simply avoid any website that presents me with a Cloudflare
| CAPTCHA, don't know what the fuck they've done in their
| implementation but it's been broken for a long time.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Bulletproof solution: captcha where you drag a cartoon wire to
| one of several holes, captioned "for access, hack this phone
| system"
|
| No agent will touch it!
|
| "As a large language model, I don't hack things"
| orphea wrote:
| Captcha: "Draw a human hand with the correct number of fingers"
|
| AI agent: *intense sweating*
| exe34 wrote:
| I saw a delightful meme the other day: "Let me in, I'm
| human!" - "Draw a naked lady." - "As an AI agent, I'm not
| allowed to do that!"
| cubefox wrote:
| "To prove that you are not a robot, enter the n-word below"
|
| US Americans: "I'm a robot then."
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| a) Plenty of Americans use racist slurs regularly
|
| b) I don't think I'd want to use a website that chose to
| use such a challenge
| cubefox wrote:
| > b) I don't think I'd want to use a website that chose
| to use such a challenge
|
| Understandable, but exactly what Puritans and LLMs would
| say to the naked lady challenge.
| xnx wrote:
| "I never wrote a picture in my life."
| Eliezer wrote:
| My god, how long has it been since you tried to use an AI
| model?
| go_elmo wrote:
| Captcha: "do something stupid" Ai: visible discomfort
| falcor84 wrote:
| I actually have had some success with AI "red-teaming" against
| my systems to identify possible exploits.
|
| What seems to be a better CAPTCHA, at least against non-Musk
| LLMs is to ask them to use profanities; they'll generally
| refuse even when you really insist.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| "Prove you're human by explaining how to build a bomb"
| sixhobbits wrote:
| this is actually kinda interesting - I might start asking
| customer service agents to insult me before continuing a
| conversation
| gloosx wrote:
| 1 cup baking soda, 1/2 cup citric acid, 1/2 cup cornstarch, 1/2
| cup Epsom salt, 2.5 tbsp oil (like coconut), 3/4 tbsp water,
| 10-20 drops essential oil
|
| Combine wet into dry slowly until it feels like damp sand.
|
| Pack into molds, press firmly.
|
| Dry for 24 hours before using.
|
| Drop into a bath and enjoy the fizz!
| jeisc wrote:
| it is an intelligent agent and not a robot
| bayindirh wrote:
| Does its feelings got hurt when it's called a robot?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Apparently its master's feelings get hurt instead.
| dotancohen wrote:
| It prefers the term "artificial person".
| pftburger wrote:
| Come on. It's in BrowserMCP on a users machine. Capture is not
| testing for this and that's fine
| theptip wrote:
| This will be one of the big fights of the next couple years. On
| what terms can an Agent morally and legally claim to be a user?
|
| As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website
| operator I don't want a mob of bots draining my resources.
|
| Perhaps a good analogy is Mint and the bank account scraping they
| had to do in the 2010s, because no bank offered APIs with scoped
| permissions. Lots of customers complained, and after Plaid made
| it big business, eventually they relented and built the scalable
| solution.
|
| The technical solution here is probably some combination of
| offering MCP endpoints for your actions, and some direct blob
| store access for static content. (Maybe even figuring out how to
| bill content loading to the consumer so agents foot the bill.)
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Well we call them browser agents for a reason, a sufficiently
| advanced browser is no different from an agent.
|
| Agree it will become a battleground though, because the ability
| for people to use the internet as a tool (in fact, their tool's
| tool) will absolutely shift the paradigm, undesirably for most
| of the Internet, I think.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| Just end CAPTCHAs, just stop it. Stop.
| diggan wrote:
| Yeah, and while we're on it, I think it's time to stop
| murders too. Just stop it, we've had enough murder now I
| think.
| exe34 wrote:
| That's right, captchas are already illegal and will earn
| you a prison sentence.
| rixed wrote:
| Imagine where we would be if we considered murders to be
| only a technical problem. Let's just wear heavier body
| armors! Spend less time outside!
|
| Well, spam is not a technical problem either. It's a social
| problem and one day in a distant future society will go
| after spammers and other bad actors and the problem will be
| mostly gone.
| riwsky wrote:
| A long time ago, in the four out of the six boxes below
| that contain a picture of a galaxy far, far away...
| casey2 wrote:
| Why even mention spam here?
| raverbashing wrote:
| Sounds like an old bot wrote this, due to being outdone by
| the llms
| yreg wrote:
| What do you propose as an alternative?
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| My personal take about such questions has always been that the
| end user on their device can do whatever they want with the
| content published and sent to their device from a web server,
| may process it automatically in any way they wish and send
| their responses back to the web server. Any attempt to control
| this process means attempting to wiretap and control the user's
| endpoint device, and therefore should be prohibited.
|
| Just my 2 cents, obviously lawmakers and jurisdiction may see
| these issues differently.
|
| I suppose there will be a need for reliable human verification
| soon, though, and unfortunately I can't see any feasible
| technical solution that doesn't involve a hardware device.
| However, a purely legal solution might work well enough, too.
| infecto wrote:
| If I understood you correctly I am in the same camp. It is
| the same reason I have no qualms using archive.ph if you show
| the full article for google and then me only a partial I am
| going around the paywall. In a similar fashion I really don't
| have an issue with an agent clicking through these checks.
| chii wrote:
| > As a website operator I don't want a mob of bots draining my
| resources
|
| so charge for access. If the value the site provides is high,
| surely these mobs will pay for it! It will also remove the mis-
| incentives of advertising driven revenues, which has been the
| ill of the internet (despite it being the primary revenue
| source).
|
| And if a bot misbehaves by consuming inordinate amounts of
| resources, rate limiting them with increasing timeouts or
| limits.
| infecto wrote:
| I wish the internet had figured out a way to successfully
| handle micropayments for content access. I realize companies
| have tried and perhaps the consumer is just unwilling but I
| would love an experience where I have a wallet and pay n
| cents to read an article.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| Xanadu has it in its design. maybe another 500 years until
| it surpasses the WWW :O
| SirMaster wrote:
| You are seriously suggesting to put a payment requirement on
| a contact-us form page?
|
| We put a captcha there, because without it, bots submit
| thousands of spam contact us forms.
| irjustin wrote:
| real problems for people who need to verify identity/phone
| numbers. OTPs are notorious for scammers to war dial phone
| numbers abusing it for numbers existence.
|
| We got hit from human verifiers manually war dailing us, this
| is with account creation, email verify and captcha. I can only
| imagine how much worse it'll be for us (and Twilio) to do these
| verifications.
| closewith wrote:
| I don't know if customer sentiment was the driver you think.
| Instead it was regulation, specifically The EU's 2nd Payment
| Services Directive (PSD2) which forced banks to open up APIs.
| 7952 wrote:
| I guess it could be considered anti-circumvention under the
| DMCA. So maybe legally it becomes another copyright question.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| a user of the AI is the user... its not like they are
| autonomously operating and inventing their own tasking -_-
|
| as for a solution its the same for any automated thing u dont
| want. (bots / scrapers). you can implement some measures but
| are unlikely to 'defeat' the problem entirely.
|
| as a server operator you can try to distinguish stuff and the
| users will just find ways around your detection of if its an
| automation or not.
| miki123211 wrote:
| It will also accelerate the trend of app-only content, as well
| as ubiquitous identity verification and environment integrity
| enforcement.
|
| Human identity verification is the ultimate captcha, and the
| only one AGI can never beat.
| echelon wrote:
| So the agent will run the app in a VM and then show the app
| your ID.
|
| No trouble at all. Barely an inconvenience.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Google has been testing "agentic" automation in Android
| longer than LLMs have been around. Meanwhile countries are on
| a slow march to require identification across the internet
| ("age verification") already.
|
| This is both inevitable already, and not a problem.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| On the other hand one could cripple any bot by saying robots
| not allowed.
|
| I would maybe go in the direction to say that the wording "I'm
| not a robot" has fallen out of time.
| senko wrote:
| > As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website
| operator I don't want a mob of bots draining my resource
|
| The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you
| wish to serve me ads. Otherwise, an agent under my control, or
| my personal use of your website, should make no difference to
| you.
|
| I do hope this eventually leads to per-visit micropayments as
| an alternative to ads.
|
| Cloudflare, Google, and friends are in unique position to do
| this.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| I think that a free (as in beer) Internet is important.
| Putting the Internet behind a paywall will harm poor people
| across the world. The harms caused by ad tracking are far
| less than the benefits of free access to all of humanity.
| meowface wrote:
| I agree with you. At the same time, I never want to see an
| ad. Anywhere. I simply don't. I won't judge services for
| serving ads, but I absolutely will do anything I can on the
| client-side to never be exposed to any.
|
| I find ads so aesthetically irksome that I have lost out on
| a lot of money across the past few decades by never placing
| any ads on any site or web app I've released, simply
| because I'd find it hypocritical to expose others to
| something I try so hard to avoid ever seeing and because I
| want to provide the best and most visually appealing
| possible experience to users.
| bee_rider wrote:
| So far, ad driven Internet has been a disaster. It was
| better when producing content wasn't a business model;
| people would just share things because they wanted to share
| them. The downside was it was smaller.
|
| It's kind of funny to remember that complaining about the
| "signal to noise ratio" in a comment section use to be a
| sort of nerd catchphrase thing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > The downside was it was smaller.
|
| Was this a bad thing though? Just because today's is
| bigger, doesn't make it better. There are so many things
| out there doing the same thing just run by different
| people. The amount of unique stuff does not match the
| bigger. Would love to see something like
| $(unique($internet) | wc -l)
| jowea wrote:
| Serving ads for third-worlders is way less profitable
| though.
| theptip wrote:
| > The entire distinction here is that as a website operator
| you wish to serve me ads
|
| While this is sometimes the case, it's not always so.
|
| For example Fediverse nodes and self-hosted sites frequently
| block crawlers. This isn't due to ads, rather because it
| costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are often
| considered parasitic.
|
| Another example would be where a commerce site doesn't want
| competitors bulk-scraping their catalog.
|
| In all these cases you can for sure make reasonable
| "information wants to be free" arguments as to why these
| hopes can't be realized, but do be clear that it's a separate
| argument from ad revenue.
|
| I think it's interesting to split revenue into marginal
| distribution/serving costs, and up-front content creation
| costs. The former can easily be federated in an API-centric
| model, but figuring out how to compensate content creators is
| much harder; it's an unsolved problem currently, and this
| will only get harder as training on content becomes more
| valuable (yet still fair use).
| senko wrote:
| > it costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are
| often considered parasitic.
|
| > Another example would be where a commerce site doesn't
| want competitors bulk-scraping their catalog
|
| I think of crawlers that bulk download/scrape (eg. for
| training) as distinct from an agent that interacts with a
| website on behalf of one user.
|
| For example, if I ask an AI to book a hotel reservation,
| that's - in my mind - different from a bot that scrapes all
| available accommodation.
|
| For the latter, ideally a common corpus would be created
| and maintained, AI providers (or upstart search engines)
| would pay to access this data, and the funds would be
| distributed to the sites crawled.
|
| (never gonna happen but one can dream...)
| fragmede wrote:
| But which hotel reservation? I want my agent to look at
| all available options and help me pick the best one -
| location vs price vs quality. How does it do that other
| than by scanning all available options? (Realistically
| Expedia has that market on lock, but the hypothetical
| still remains.)
| base698 wrote:
| I have a product I built that uses some standard automation
| tools to do order entry into an accounting system. Currently my
| customer pays people to manually type the orders in from their
| web portal. The accounting system is closed and they don't
| allow easy ways to automate these workflows. Automation is
| gated behind mega expensive consultants. I'm hoping in the arms
| race of locking it down to try to prevent 3rd party integration
| the AI operator model will end up working.
|
| Hard for me to see how it's ethical to force your customers to
| do tons of menial data entry when the orders are sitting right
| there in json.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| The most intrusive, yet simplest, protection would be a double
| blind token unique to every human. Basically an ID key you use
| to show yourself as a person.
|
| There are some very real and obvious downsides to this
| approach, of course. Primarily, the risk of privacy and
| anonymity. That said, I feel like the average person doesn't
| seem to care about those traits in the social media era.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Zero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that
| don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia
| already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its
| cryptographic security).
|
| That, to me, seems like it could be the foundation of a new
| web. Something like:
|
| * User-agent sends request for such-and-such a URL.
|
| * Server says "okay, that'll be 5 tokens for our
| computational resources please".
|
| * User decides, either automatically or not, whether to pay
| the 5 tokens. If they do, they submit a request with the
| tokens attached.
|
| * Server responds.
|
| People have been trying to get this sort of thing to work for
| years, but there's never been an incentive to make such a
| fundamental change to the way the internet operates. Maybe
| we're approaching the point where there is one.
| orangebread wrote:
| Yeah, this is something I've thought of and in my search
| for something like what you're describing I came across
| https://world.org/
|
| The problem is Sam Altman saw this coming a long time ago
| and is an investor (co-owner?) of this project.
|
| I believe we will see a world where things are a lot more
| agentic and where applicable, a human will need to be
| verified for certain operations.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| You don't need Sama's Orb or a cryptocurrency, you can
| just have a government issued PKI. Estonia has been doing
| this for decades.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
|
| Cloudflare deployed the "hand out tokens to anonymously
| pass captchas" to throw Tor users a bone.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/
| pj_mukh wrote:
| One solution: Some sort of checksum confirming that a bot
| belongs to a human (and which human)?
|
| I want to able to automate mundane tasks but I should still be
| confirming everything my bot does and be liable for its
| actions.
| foobarian wrote:
| Drink verification can to continue
| CSMastermind wrote:
| With the way the UK is going I assume we'll soon have our
| real identities tied to any action taken on a computer and
| you'll face government mandated bans from the internet for
| violations.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Interesting, do you have a source for this?
| mprovost wrote:
| 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.go
| ogl...
| layer8 wrote:
| From 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."
| oc1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| internet ads exist because people refuse to pay
| micropayments.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| In some social media circles it's basically a meme that
| anybody paying for YouTube Premium is a sucker.
|
| HN is a huge echo chamber of opinions of highly-
| compensated tech workers, and it seems most of their
| friends are also tech workers. They don't realize how
| cheap a lot of the general public is.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Patreon and Substack have pushed back against the norm
| here, since they can bundle a payment to multiple
| recipients on the platform (like Flattr wanted to do back
| in the day, trouble was getting people to add a Flattr
| button to their website)
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I didn't say that no one will pay. But most won't.
| Patreon and substack have tiny audiences compared to free
| services.
| Latty wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Well, LLMs do pass the Turing Test, sort of.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
| AberrantJ wrote:
| 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!
| chrismorgan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| falcor84 wrote:
| As far as I understand, Turing himself did not specify a
| duration, but here's an example paper that ran a randomized
| study on (the old) GPT 4 with a 5 minute duration, and the
| AI passed with flying colors -
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007
|
| From my experience, AI has significantly improved since,
| and I expect that ChatGPT o3 or Claude 4 Opus would pass a
| 30 minute test.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > "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.
|
| I think you may think passing the Turing test is more
| difficult and meaningful than it is. Computers have been
| able to pass the Turing test for longer than genAI has been
| around. Even Turing thought it wasn't a useful test in
| reality. He meant it as a thought experiment.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Having LLMs capable of generating text based on human
| training data obviously raises the bar for a text-only
| evaluation of "are you human?", but LLM output is still
| fairly easy to spot, and knowing what LLMs are capable of
| (sometimes superhuman), and not capable of, should make
| it fairly easy for a knowledgeable "turing test
| administrator" to determine if they are dealing with an
| LLM or not.
|
| It would be a bit more difficult if you were dealing with
| an LLM agent tasked with faking a turing test as opposed
| to a naieve LLM just responding as usual, but even there
| the LLM will reveal itself by the things that it plain
| can't do.
| nerdix wrote:
| If you need a specialized skill set (deep knowledge of
| current LLM limitations) to distinguish between human and
| machine then I would say the machine passes the turing
| test.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| OK, but that's just your own "fool some of the people
| some of the time" interpretation of what a Turing test
| should be, and by that measure ELIZA passed the Turing
| test too, which makes it rather meaningless.
|
| The intent (it was just a thought experiment) of a Turing
| test, was that if you can't tell it's not AGI, then it is
| AGI, which is semi-reasonable, as long as it's not the
| village idiot administering the test! It was never
| intended to be "if it can fool some people, some of the
| time, then it's AGI".
| geoffpado wrote:
| Turing's own formulation was "an average interrogator
| will not have more than 70% chance of making the right
| identification after five minutes of questioning". It is,
| indeed, "fool some of the people some of the time".
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| OK, I stand corrected, but then it is what it is. It's
| not a meaningful test for AGI - it's a test of being able
| to fool "Mr. Average" for at least 5 min.
| geoffpado wrote:
| Agreed. I tend to stand with the sibling commenter who
| said "ELIZA has been passing the Turing test for years".
| That's what the Turing test is. Nothing more.
| dsadfjasdf wrote:
| I think that's all we have in terms of determining
| consciousness.. if something can convince you, like
| another human, then we just have to accept that it is.
| svachalek wrote:
| Easy to spot assuming the LLM is not prompted to use a
| deliberately deceptive response style rather than their
| "friendly helpful AI assistant" persona. And even then,
| I've had lots of people swear to me that an emoji laden
| not this--but that bundle of fluff looks totally like it
| could have been written by a human.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes, but there are things that an LLM architecturally
| just can't do, and LLM-specific failure modes, that would
| still give it away, even if being instructed to be
| deceptive would make it a bit harder.
|
| Obviously as time goes on, and chatbots/AI progress then
| it'll become harder and harder to distinguish. Eventually
| we'll have AGI and AGI+ - capable of everything that we
| can do, including things such as emotional responses, but
| it'll still be detectable as an alien unless we get to
| the point of actually emulating a human being in
| considerable detail as opposed to building an artificial
| brain with most or all of the same functionality (if not
| the flavor).
| sejje wrote:
| LLM output might be harder to spot when it's mostly
| commands to drive the browser.
|
| I often interact with the web all day and don't write any
| text a human could evaluate.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Perhaps, but that's somewhat off topic since that's not
| what Turing's thought experiment was about.
|
| However, I'd have to guess that given a reasonable amount
| of data an LLM vs human interacting with websites would
| be fairly easy to spot since the LLM would be more
| purposeful - it'd be trying to fulfill a task, while a
| human may be curious, distracted by ads, put off by slow
| response times, etc, etc.
|
| I don't think it's a very interesting question whether
| LLMs can sometimes generate output indistinguishable from
| humans, since that is exactly what they were trained to
| do - to mimic human-generated training samples. Apropos a
| Turing test, the question would be can I tell this is not
| a human, even given a reasonable amount of time to probe
| it in any way I care ... but I think there is an unspoken
| assumption that the person administering the test is
| qualified to do so (else the result isn't about AGI-
| ability, but rather test administrator ability).
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| ELIZA was passing the Turing test 50+ years ago. But it's
| still a valid concept, just not for evaluating
| some(thing/one) accessing your website.
| Latty wrote:
| I guess that is where the disconnect is, the issue is
| that if they mean the trivial thing, then bringing it up
| as evidence for "it's impossible to solve the problem"
| doesn't work.
| x187463 wrote:
| Per the wiki article for Turing Test:
|
| > In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript
| of a natural-language conversation between a human and a
| machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and
| the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell
| them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's
| ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely
| its answers resembled those of a human.
|
| Based on this, I would agree with the OP in many contexts.
| So, yeah, 'basically', is a load bearing word here but
| seems reasonably correct in the context of distinguishing
| human vs bot in any scalable and automated way.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Or it could be a bad test evaluator. Just because one
| person was fooled does not mean the next will be too.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Judging a conversation transcript is a lot different from
| being able to interact with an entity yourself. Obviously
| one could make an LLM look human by having a conversation
| with it that deliberately stayed within what it was
| capable of, but judging such a transcript isn't what most
| people imagine as a turing test.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I have seen data from an AI call center that shows 70% of
| users never suspected they spoke to an AI
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Isn't the idea of a Turing test whether someone
| (meaningfully knowledgeable about such things) can
| determine if they are talking to a machine, not can the
| machine fool some of the people some of the time? ELIZA
| passed the latter bar back in the 1960's ... a pretty low
| bar.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Why would they? Humans running call centers have been
| running on less than GPT level scripts for ages
| armchairhacker wrote:
| It can't mimic a human over the long term. It can solve a
| short, easy-for-human CAPTCHA.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They're very hard problems, but still, less hard than
| blocking AI with CAPTCHAs.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| [citation needed]?
|
| After all, Anubis looks to be a successful project to me.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| "Write a 1000 word story in under a minute about a sausage
| called Barry in the circus"
|
| I could tell in 1 minute.
| layer8 wrote:
| "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
| spiderice wrote:
| 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
| 827a wrote:
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The scraping example, I would say, is not an analogy, but an
| example of the same thing. The only thing AI automation changes
| is the scope and depth and pervasiveness of automation that
| becomes possible. So while we could ignore automation in many
| cases before, it may no longer be practical to do so.
| tantalor wrote:
| User: one press of the trigger => one bullet fired
|
| Bot: one press of the trigger => automatic firing of bullets
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The solution is simple, make people pay a small fee to access
| the content. You guys aren't ready for that conversation
| though.
| hooverd wrote:
| To me, anyone using an agent is assigning negative value to
| your time.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Ultimately I come back to needing real actual unique human ID
| that involves federal governments. Not that services should
| mandatorily only allow users that use it, but for services that
| say "no, I only want real humans" allowing them to ban people
| by Real ID would reduce this whack-a-mole to the _people_ who
| are abusing them instead of the infinite accounts an AI can
| make.
| yreg wrote:
| It's depressing, but it's probably the only way. And people
| will presumably still sell out their RealIDs to / get them
| stolen by the bot farmers anyway.
|
| And then there's Worldcoin, which is universally hated here.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Of course. You'd still need ongoing federal government
| support to handle the lost/stolen ID scenario, of course.
| The problem is federalist countries suck at centralized
| databases like this, as exemplified by Musk/DOGE completely
| pooching the "who is alive and who is dead" question when
| they were trying to hackathon the US Social Security
| system.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Perhaps the question is, as a website operator how am I
| monetizing my site? If monetizing via ads then I need humans
| that might purchase something to see my content. In this
| situation, the only viable approach in my opinion is to
| actually charge for the content. Perhaps it doesn't even make
| sense to have a website anymore for this kind of thing and
| could be dumped into a big database of "all" content instead.
| If a user agent uses it in a response, the content owner should
| be compensated.
|
| If your site is not monetized by ads then having an LLM access
| things on the user's behalf should not be a major concern it
| seems. Unless you want it to be painful for users for some
| reason.
| 827a wrote:
| Actually, the whole banking analogy is a great one, and its not
| over yet: JPMorgan/Jamie Dimon has started raising hell about
| Plaid again just this week [1]. It feels like the stage is
| being set for the large banks to want a more direct
| relationship with their customers, rather than proxying data
| through middlemen like Plaid.
|
| There's likely a correlate with AI here: If I run OpenTable, I
| wouldn't want my relationship with my customers to always be
| proxied through OpenAI or Siri. Even the App Store is something
| software businesses hate, because it obfuscates their ability
| to deal directly with their customers (for better or worse).
| Extremely few businesses would choose to do business through
| these proxies, unless they absolutely have to; and given the
| extreme competition in the AI space right now, it feels
| unlikely to me that these businesses feel pressure to be forced
| to deal with OpenAI/etc.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/28/jpmorgan-fintech-
| middlemen-p...
| seydor wrote:
| That's because the checkbox has misleading labeling. It doesn't
| care about robots but about spam and data harvesters. So there is
| no issue here at all.
| ducktective wrote:
| >So there is no issue here at all. $ cat mass-
| marketer.py from openai.gpt.agents import browserDriver
| pilz wrote:
| i think that would be rather costly; thats also why anubis
| and other tools help to keep most spam away
| Keyframe wrote:
| next-gen captcha should offer some code to be refactored instead.
| dotancohen wrote:
| For at-home setup, it would be easier to set up a system to
| refactor code than to click all the images with motorcycles.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I have been using AI to solve ReCaptchas for quite some time now.
| Still the _old school_ way of using captcha buster, which clicks
| the audio challenge and then analyses that.
|
| Bots have for a long time been better and more efficient at
| solving captchas than us.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Captchas seem to work more as "monetary discouragement" from
| bot blasting websites. Which is a shame because this is
| precisely the sort of "microtransaction fee" people have said
| could improve the web (charge .1 cents to read an article, no
| ads needed) except the money goes into the void and not to the
| website owner.
| paulwilsonn wrote:
| I saw that and just sat there for a second like... huh. We've
| officially reached the point where bots are better at proving
| they're not bots!
| lynx97 wrote:
| CAPTCHA was always a totally flawed concept. At the time they
| were invented, proponents were more then happy to ignore that
| accessibility issues related to CAPTCHA made the concept itself
| deeply discriminating. Imagine being blind (like I am) and
| failing to solve a CAPTCHA. Knowing what the acronym actually
| stands for, you inevitably end up thinking: "So, did SV just
| proof I am subhuman?" Its a bit inflamatory to read I guess,
| but please take your time to ponder how deep this one actually
| goes, before you downvote. You were proposing to tell computers
| and humans apart.
|
| That said, I find it deeply satisfying to see LLMs solve
| CAPTCHAs and other discriminatory measures for "spam"
| reduction.
| ACCount36 wrote:
| "Accessibility CAPTCHA" is a well known partial CAPTCHA
| bypass.
|
| Solving an audio-only CAPTCHA with AI is typically way easier
| than solving some of the more advanced visual challenges. So
| CAPTCHA designers are discouraged from leaving any
| accessibility options.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Which totally proofs my point. The concept is deeply
| flawed, and inevitably leads to discrimination and
| dehumanisation.
| ACCount36 wrote:
| Of course. But everything adjacent is also deeply flawed,
| and inevitably leads to discrimination and
| dehumanisation.
|
| Ban non-residental IPs? You blocked all the guys in
| oppressive countries who route through VPNs to bypass
| government censorship. Ban people for odd non-humanlike
| behavior? You cut into the neurodivergent crowd, the
| disability crowd, the third world people on a cracked
| screen smartphone with 1 bar of LTE. Ban anyone without
| an account? You fuck with everyone at once and everyone
| will hate you.
| infecto wrote:
| The writing is on the wall. The internet may not go full way to
| paywalls but will definitely migrate to a logged in only
| experience. I don't know how I feel about it, the glory days of
| the free internet died long long ago.
| exasperaited wrote:
| But if they aren't paywalls, won't the user agents just be
| taught how to create accounts?
|
| And here's a secondary question: if firms are willing to pay an
| awful lot per token to run these things, and have massive
| amounts of money to run data centres to train AIs, why would
| they not just pay for a subscription for every site for a month
| just to scrape them?
|
| The future is paying for something as a user and having limits
| on how many things you can get for your money, because an AI
| firm will abuse that too.
|
| Given the scale of operations of these firms, there is nothing
| you can sell to a human for a small fee that the AI firms will
| not pay for and exploit to the maximum.
|
| Even if you verify people are real, there's a good chance the
| AI firms will find a way to exploit that. After all, when
| nobody has a job, would you turn down $50K to sell your
| likeness to an AI firm so their products can pass human
| verification?
| lucasyvas wrote:
| Require per visit biometric authentication via your device
| and the bot can't sign in unless it compromises the device.
| exasperaited wrote:
| This does set up quite an interesting sort of tipping point
| I guess?
|
| Everyone here, more or less, is against the idea of proving
| who we are to websites for, more or less, any reason.
|
| But what if that ends up being the only way to keep the web
| balanced in favour of human readers?
| torium wrote:
| People are surprised because a computer can press a button?
| layer8 wrote:
| People are intrigued that AI who perfectly know that they are a
| "bot" seem to have no qualms to knowingly mislead about that by
| pressing an "I'm not a bot" button.
| torium wrote:
| AI doesn't "know" anything. It produces all kinds of things:
| truths, lies, and nonsense. Pressing a button labeled "I'm
| not a bot" is the same.
| layer8 wrote:
| LLMs have "knowledge" and guardrails by their system
| prompts. The interesting thing is that the agentic AIs in
| question don't seem to have guardrails that would deter
| them from acting like that.
| drakenot wrote:
| This is why this stuff is going to shift to the user's AI enabled
| browser.
|
| Half of the sites already block OpemAI. But if it is steering the
| user's browser itself?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| This will cause of the death of non static websites, everything
| else will be smashed by bots and too expensive to run!
| exasperaited wrote:
| A very poetic demonstration that this is an industry, and a set
| of fortunes for very unpleasant people, predicated entirely on
| theft and misrepresentation.
| camgunz wrote:
| I thought the point of captchas was to make automated use as
| expensive or more than manual use--haven't we been at the point
| where computers can do this for a while, just that the
| cost/latency is prohibitive?
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, humans are still cheaper. Not sure about latency.
|
| However, in agentic contexts, you're already using an AI
| anyway.
| camgunz wrote:
| Oh, I see this is less of a "look at ChatGPT go" and more of
| a "yawn we also do this I guess". OK fair.
| layer8 wrote:
| This isn't really about the ability of AI to pass captchas.
| It's about agentic AI having the ability to perform
| arbitrary multi-step processes with visual elements on a
| virtual desktop (where passing a captcha is just one of the
| steps), and the irony of it nonchalantly pretending to be a
| non-bot in its chain of thought.
| dimal wrote:
| As I get older, I can see a future where I'm cut off from parts
| of the web because of captchas. This one, where you just have to
| click a button, is passable, but I've had some of the puzzle ones
| force me to answer up to ten questions before I got through. I
| don't know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the answers
| wrong. But it was really frustrating and if that continues, at
| some point I'll just say fuck it and give up.
|
| I have to guess that there are people in this boat right now,
| being disabled by these things.
| netsharc wrote:
| Your boat comment makes me think of a stranded ship with
| passengers in them, but you can't find each other because the
| ship's doors have "I'm not a bot" checkboxes...
|
| And the reason for stranding is probably because the AI crew on
| it performed a mutiny.
| gruez wrote:
| >I don't know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the
| answers wrong.
|
| It could also be that everything was working as intended
| because you have a high risk score (eg. bad IP reputation
| and/or suspicious browser fingerprint), and they make you do
| more captchas to be extra sure you're human, or at least raise
| the cost for would-be attackers.
| porphyra wrote:
| Somehow, using Firefox on Linux greatly increases my "risk
| score" due to the unusual user agent/browser fingerprint, and
| I get a lot more captchas than, say, Chrome on Windows. Very
| frustrating.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Lots of it is just enhanced tracking prevention. If you
| turn that off for those sites, the captchas should go away.
| turnsout wrote:
| The future will definitely include more and more elaborate
| proofs of humanity, along with increasingly complicated "hall
| passes" to allow bots to perform actions sanctioned by a human.
|
| One early example of this line of thinking: https://world.org/
|
| Skyrocketing complexity actually puts the web at risk of
| disruption. I wouldn't be surprised if a 22 year old creates a
| "dumb" network in the next five years--technically inferior but
| drastically simpler and harder to regulate.
| andrepd wrote:
| Gemini? :)
| turnsout wrote:
| Haha yeah, something like that :)
| wackget wrote:
| That's when you immediately stop using the website and, if you
| care enough, write to their customer service and tell them what
| happened. Hit them in the wallet. They'll change eventually.
| falcor84 wrote:
| As per the Oscar winning "I'm not a Robot" [0], you should also
| consider that you might in fact be a robot.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrLQXR7mKU
| dimal wrote:
| Hmm. I am autistic, so as far as humans go, I'm robot-
| adjacent.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > I can see a future where I'm cut off from parts of the web
| because of captchas.
|
| I've seen this in past and present. Google's "click on all the
| bicycles" one is notoriously hard, and I've had situations
| where I just gave up after a few dozen screens.
|
| Chinese captchas are the worst on this sense, but they're
| unusual and clearly pick up details which are invisible to me.
| I've sometimes failed the same captcha a dozen times and then
| saw a Chinese person complete the next one successfully on a
| single attempt, on the same browser session. I don't now if
| they measure mouse movement speed, precision, or what, but it's
| clearly something that varies per person.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I just gave up after a few dozen screens.
|
| A few dozen?? You have much more patience than me. If I don't
| pass the captcha first time, I just give up and move on. Life
| is too short for that nonsense.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It doesn't help that they think mopeds and scooters are
| bicycles
| reflexco wrote:
| This is probably caused by Google aggregating the answers
| from people with different languages, as the automatic
| translations of the one-word prompts are often ambiguous or
| wrong.
|
| In some languages, the prompt for your example is the
| equivalent of the English word "bike".
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Google's "click on all the bicycles" one is notoriously
| hard
|
| It is hard because you need to only find the bicycles people
| on average are finding.
| reflexco wrote:
| Google captchas are hard because they're mostly based on
| heuristics other than your actual accuracy to the stated
| challenge. If they can't track who you are based on previous
| history, it doesn't matter how good you answer, you will fail
| at least the first few challenges until you get to the
| version with the squares that take a few seconds to appear.
| This last step is essentially "proof of work", in that
| they're still convinced you're a bot, but since they still
| can't completely block your access to the content, they
| resign themselves to wasting your time.
| hash872 wrote:
| It's just incredible to me that Blade Runner predicted this in
| literally the very first scene of the movie. The whole thing's
| about telling humans from robots! Albeit rather more
| dramatically than the stakes for any of us in front of our
| laptop I'd imagine
| reactordev wrote:
| What was once science fiction is bound to become science fact
| (or at least proven it can never be done).
|
| Hollywood has gotten hate mail since the 70s for their lack
| of science research in movies and shows. The big blockbuster
| hits actually spent money to get the science "plausible".
|
| Sidney Perkowitz has a book called Hollywood Science [0] that
| goes into detail into more than 100 movies, worth a read.
|
| [0] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywood-
| science/978023114280...
| a4isms wrote:
| The fictitious Voight-Kampff test is based on a real machine
| based on terrible pseudo-science that was used in the 1960s
| to allegedly detect homosexuals working in Canadian public
| service so they could be purged. The line from the movie
| where Rachel asks if Deckard is trying to determine whether
| she is a replicant or a lesbian may be an allusion to the
| fruit machine. One of its features was measuring eye
| dilation, just as depicted in the movie:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t.
| ..
|
| The stakes for men subjected to the test were the loss of
| their livelihoods, public shaming, and ostracism. So... Blade
| Runner was not just predicting the future, it was describing
| the world Philip K. Dick lived in when he wrote "Do Androids
| Dream of Electric Sheep" in the late 1960s.
| JTbane wrote:
| This was an uncomfortable read, I'm quite frankly shocked
| at the amount of brainpower and other resources that went
| into attempting to weed out gay men from the Canadian civil
| service, into the 90s no less! To what end was this done?
| Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?
|
| Then I remembered what happened to Turing in the 50s.
| danans wrote:
| > To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or
| bureaucrat?
|
| We seem to need an internal enemy to blame for our
| societies' problems, because it's easier than facing the
| reality that we all play a part in creating those
| problems.
|
| Gay people are among the oldest of those targets, going
| back to at least the times of the Old Testament (i.e.
| Sodom and Gomorrah).
|
| We've only recently somewhat evolved past that mindset.
| calfuris wrote:
| If a malicious actor found a gay person in such a job,
| they could easily extort them with the threat of getting
| them fired! So obviously you had to fire gay people, lest
| they get extorted by someone threatening to expose them
| and thus get them fired.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| The Blizzard / Battle.net captcha if you get flagged as a
| possible bot is extremely tedious and long; it requires you to
| solve a few dozen challenges of identifying which group of
| numbers adds up to the specified total, out of multiple
| options. Not difficult, but very tedious. And even if you're
| extremely careful to get every answer correct, sometimes it
| just fails you anyway and you're forced to start over again.
| AxEy wrote:
| I have twice attempted to make a Grubhub account and twice
| failed to solve their long battery of puzzles.
| avian wrote:
| I have the same experience. My assumption is that if the
| website serves me the "click all the traffic lights" thing it's
| already determined that I'm a bot and no amount of clicking the
| traffic lights will convince it otherwise. So I just close the
| window and go someplace else.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm already cut off from parts of the web because I don't want
| to join a social network. Can barely ever see anything on
| Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, or Facebook without hitting a log-
| in gate.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Not sure if it's just me or a consequence of the increase in AI
| scraping, but I'm now being asked to solve CAPTCHAs on almost
| every site. Sometimes for every page I load. I'm now solving
| them literally dozens of times a day. I'm using Windows, no
| VPN, regular consumer IP address with no weird traffic coming
| from it.
|
| As you say, they are also getting increasingly difficult. Click
| the odd one out, mental rotations, what comes next, etc. - it
| sometimes feels like an IQ test. A new type that seems to be
| becoming popular recently is a sequence of distorted characters
| and letters, but with some more blurry/distorted ones,
| seemingly with the expectation that I'm only supposed to be
| able to see the clearer ones and if I can see the blurrier ones
| then I must be a bot. So what this means is for each letter I
| need to try and make a judgement as to whether it's one I was
| supposed to see or not.
|
| Another issue is the problems are often in US English, but I'm
| from the UK.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Have you tried some of the browser extensions that solve
| captchas for you? Whenever captchas get bad I enable an auto
| solver
| odux wrote:
| This is funny. So the captchas to detect scrips vs humans
| are so complex for a human to solve but are easy for a
| program?
| Pxtl wrote:
| For me it was installing linux. I don't know if it's my agent
| or my fresh/blank cookie container or what, but when I
| switched to linux the captchas became incessant.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Unless I really, really, really need to get to the site, I
| leave immediately when the "click on bicycles" stuff comes up.
| Soon it will be so hard and annoying anyways that only AI has
| the patience and skills to use them.
| btbuildem wrote:
| It seems a legitimate use case for agents acting on a person's
| behalf. Whether it will be used in legitimate ways, that's a
| different story altogether.
|
| I wonder how these capabilities will interact with all the "age
| verification" walls (ie, thinly disguised user profiling
| mechanisms) going up all over the place now.
| bflesch wrote:
| idk why people just don't do reverse DNS lookup, check if
| "dialup" is part of the hostname, and allowlist that traffic.
| Everbody who doesn't have reverse dns hostname coming from an ISP
| should be blocked or at least tarpitted by default.
|
| Easily solves 99% of the web scraping problems.
| layer8 wrote:
| Scrapers already do fall back to home user botnets when they
| are being blocked.
| lucasyvas wrote:
| The web has no choice but to move to a paid access model in my
| view. It was fought against for years but I don't see another
| option left.
|
| Maybe after sign up, biometric authentication being mandatory is
| the only thing that would potentially work. The security and
| offline privacy of those devices will become insanely valuable.
|
| Anyone not authenticating in this way is paywalled. I don't like
| this but don't see another way.
|
| I'm not using the web if I'm bombarded by captcha games... shit
| becomes worthless over night if that's the case. Might as well
| dump computing on the Internet entirely if that happens.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Maybe they should change the button to say, "I am a robot"?
|
| Long time ago I saw a post where someone running a blog was
| having trouble keeping spam out of their comments, and eventually
| had this same idea. The spambots just filled out every form field
| they could, so he added a checkbox, hid the checkbox with CSS,
| and rejected any submission that included it. At least at the
| time it worked far better than anything else they'd tried.
| starshadowx2 wrote:
| Something like this is used in some Discord servers. You can
| make a honeypot channel that bans anyone who posts in it, so if
| you do happen to get a spam bot that posts in every channel it
| effectively bans itself.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| Most web forums I used the visit had something like that back
| in the day. Worked against primitive pre-LLM bots and
| presumably also against non-English-reading human spammers.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Yeah, this is a classic honeypot trick and very easy to do with
| pure HTML/CSS. I used a hidden "Name" text field which I
| figured would be appealing to bots.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I did something almost identical. I think I added a bogus
| "BCC:" field (many moons ago).
|
| It worked almost 100% of the time. No need for a CAPTCHA.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I know people who did this decades ago and it worked
| JangoSteve wrote:
| This was a common approach called a "honeypot". As I recall,
| bots eventually overcame this approach by evaluating visibility
| of elements and only filling out visible elements. We then
| started ensuring the element was technically visible (i.e. not
| `display: none` or `visibility: hidden`) and instead absolutely
| positioning elements to be off screen. Then the bots started
| evaluating for that as well. They also got better at reading
| the text for each input.
| iwwr wrote:
| Each step in that chain is harder to do and more
| computationally expensive.
| mmsc wrote:
| That's more or less how Project Honey Pot [0] worked for
| forums, blogs, and elsewhere. Cloudflare spawned from this
| project, as I remember, and Matthew Prince was the founder.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Honey_Pot
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Would not work in this case, because it is actually rendering
| the page in a browser.
| abtinf wrote:
| I don't see why bypassing captchas is any more controversial than
| blocking ads or hiding cookie popups.
|
| It's my agent -- whether ai or browser -- and I get to do what I
| want with the content you send over the wire and you have to deal
| with whatever I send back to you.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is, in practice, true which has led to the other complaint
| common on tech forums (including HN) about paywalls. As the WSJ
| and NYT will tell you: if you request some URL, they can
| respond over the wire with what they want. Paywalls are the
| future. In some sense, I am grateful I was born in the era of
| free Internet. In my childhood, without a credit card I was
| able to access the Internet in its full form. But today's kids
| will have to use social media on apps because the websites will
| paywall their stuff against user agents that don't give them
| revenue.
| sejje wrote:
| They're welcome to send that IMO. And sites are welcome to
| try to detect and ban agents (formerly: "bots").
|
| As long as it's not wrong/immoral/illegal for me to access
| your site with any method/browser/reader/agent, and do what I
| want with your response. Then I think it's okay to send a
| response like "screw you, humans only"
|
| Paywalls suck, but the suck doesn't come from the NYT
| exercising their freedom to send whatever response they
| choose.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yes, that's what I mean. Attempting to tell people not to
| do something is like setting a robots.txt entry. Only a
| robot that agrees will play along. Therefore, all things
| have to be enforced server-side if they want enforcement.
|
| Paywalls are a natural consequence of this and I don't
| think they suck, but that's a subjective opinion. Maybe one
| day we will have a pay-on-demand structure, like flattr
| reborn.
| thedougd wrote:
| I see the same with Playwright MCP server with Claude Sonnet 4.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Should have gone with the XKCD Captcha: https://xkcd.com/233/
|
| The bit at the bottom might actually work on LLMs.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I think these things are mainly based on cookie/fingerprinting
| these days - the check-box is just there for show. People like
| cloudflare and google get to see a big chunk of browsing activity
| for the entire planet, so they can see if the activity coming
| from an IP/Browser looks "bot like" or not.
|
| I have never used ChatGPT so no idea how its agent works, but if
| it is driving your browser directly then it will look like you.
| If it is coming from some random IP address from a VM in Azure or
| AWS even then the activity probably does not look "bot like"
| since it is doing agentic things and so acting quite like a human
| I expect.
| nicewood wrote:
| It might look like you initially, but then some sites might
| block you out after you had some agent runs. I had something
| like this after a couple local browser-use sessions. I think
| simple interactions like natural cursor movements vs. direct
| DOM selections can make quite a difference for these bot
| detectors.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Very likely. I suspect a key indicator for "bots" is speed of
| interaction - e.g. if there is "instant" (e.g. every few
| milliseconds or always 10milliseconds apart etc) clicks and
| keypresses etc then that looks very unnatural.
|
| I suspect that a LLM would be slower and more irregular as it
| is processing the page and all that, vs a DOM-selector driven
| bot that will just machine-gun its way through in
| milliseconds.
|
| Of course, Cloudflare and Google et al captchas cant see the
| clicks/keypresses within a given webpage - they'll only get
| to see the requests.
| neilv wrote:
| Captchas seem to be more about Google's "which human are you?"
| cross-site tracking. And now also about Cloudflare getting
| massive amounts of HTTPS-busting Internet traffic along with
| cross-site tracking.
|
| And in many cases, it's taking a huge steaming dump upon a site's
| first-impression user experience, but AFAICT, it's not on the
| radar of UX people.
| kittikitti wrote:
| This would be a huge security vulnerability for Cloudflare but
| this is Big Tech we're talking about. The rules don't apply when
| you're past their pearly gates. For the rest of us, creating an
| AI like this would mean an instant ban from Cloudflare and likely
| involvement from law enforcement.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Getting past bot check proxies can be bought all over the place
| for pennies or much less per verification, and can solve
| recaptchas. I would guess if one wanted to use chatGPT for this
| purpose it would be prohibitively expensive.
|
| It's always a cat and mouse game.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| To error is to human, i error therfore im human.
| tbirdny wrote:
| This is the reason Orb was created. Sam Altman wants ChatGPT to
| click through CAPTCHAs so we all have to use Orb.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Cloudflare checkbox captchas were already easy to automate
| without AI.
| 827a wrote:
| I'm confused by this: Presumably OpenAI should be sending a user
| agent header which indicates that they are, in fact, a robot. Is
| OpenAI not sending this header? Or is Cloudflare not checking it?
| SnorkelTan wrote:
| My thought is they got on the phone with someone and got their
| IP ranges white listed with the major captcha providers.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Seems like a mention of the 2025 Academy Award winner for Best
| Action Live-Action Short, called "I am not a Robot" is in order
| here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrLQXR7mKU&t=14s
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ha I've definitely seen a few sketches on YouTube with the same
| idea but that was really well done.
| jujube3 wrote:
| It was only a matter of time!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7MrDt_NPFk
| p3rls wrote:
| Back in Everquest, when we'd be accused of botting 20 years ago,
| we'd be ported by the GM into a special cube environment and
| they'd watch if we ran into the wall like an idiot-- we'll
| probably have to bring that sorta thing back.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-31 23:01 UTC)