@jon-nyc said:

You’ll probably be more pissed when you discover (if you didn’t know) that every time you do a captcha you’ve been training google’s self driving car software (Waymo).

I’ve heard about this but never really read anything official. As you say though, it’s a very clever way to do the training!

@bernard i am another person who has avoided smart home appliances. I hate to think that at some point in the not so distant future, something will break and we won’t be able to avoid replacing it with a smart device.

AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self-replication on smart devices

IMO, if you build anything this sinister your ass should be hauled off to court. It breaks many human laws.

@jon-nyc said:

You’ll probably be more pissed when you discover (if you didn’t know) that every time you do a captcha you’ve been training google’s self driving car software (Waymo).

I knew that.

It was a good solution before AI came on the scene. But it is no longer viable and not everyone is benefiting. I've been reading that people are now abandoning pages because the captchas are so impossible. Sales lost, websites losing traffic. Captchas no longer work, these latest horrors are outrageous. My recent experience bears this out. I was this close to quitting eBay because I kept getting unclear captchas with blurry images, some of which make no sense. It's ridiculous.

Bring back captchas that humans can understand and abolish AI.

I’ve thought it was really elegant. Websites needed a way to verify users are human. We want the services the website provides, which at least in some cases would be diminished if they had a big bot problem. Google needed loads of training data on images related to traffic (ever notice it’s always traffic related? Fire hydrant, cross walk, trailer? Bus, overpass, etc?). Problem solved, everyone benefits.