With spammers having already written software to match humans at solving some CAPTCHAs, many are predicting the end of the CAPTCHA. Not so, says Luis von Ahn (developer of the reCAPTCHA system) in a New Scientist article that asks why not set the spammers further AI tasks that they can solve inadvertently.
Software that can solve any text-based CAPTCHA will be as much a milestone for artificial intelligence as it will be a problem for online security. […]
“If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great – they have solved an AI problem,” says von Ahn. The criminal underworld has created a kind of X prize for OCR.
That bonus for artificial intelligence will come at no more than a short-term cost for security groups. They can simply switch for an alternative CAPTCHA system – based on images, for example – presenting the eager spamming community with a new AI problem to crack.
via Richard Holden
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One response to “Using Spammers to Solve AI Problems”
Its already been determined that the CAPTCHA attack (‘penis flood’ attack) didn’t have to 100% solve the problem – simply be able to game the system by flooding it.
This supposition that something good can come out of spammers cracking the CAPTCHA system sounds very much like the AI/Turing Test industry trying to make lemonade from the lemons the hackers have made out of their software.