today in order to do a Google search I had to prove to Google that I wasn’t a robot. And even though I did it right the second time, they still made me do it a third time. I just remember sitting there going, Google, I actually am a human and your AI sucks so if I have to tap on storefronts and cars one more time to do a freaking Google search then I’m just using Bing.
It's partly using you for free labour to train their next generation of SkyNet.
We've reached a point with CAPTCHAs (originally conceived as a way for humans to exert their will over machines) where the machines are now setting tasks for the humans, and the humans are carrying out the tasks without putting up too much of a fight.
This thread is complaining about the fully automated process used by Google to check for copyright violations, and how infeasible it is to hire someone to check each video.
You're talking about how CAPTCHAs are now being used to get free labour.
> Prove you're human: Does the following video contain Beat It by Michael Jackson?
I am pretty sure they have considered it. Probably there is a legal hiccup laying here -- you either have reasonable suspicion that the material you show is copyrighted, or you acknowledge your algorithms and AI suck and you require crowd-sourcing. Kind of a lose-lose legally, and they would possibly introduce liability.
Recall the goal of Google is to avoid liability via the statement "we are pretty good and have really low false negatives", and have as few false positives as not to make the platform unusable.
Google does not care about content creators or propagation of knowledge (instructive videos) and ideas. Simple statement here. Google engineers might (at least the friends I have), but not as a whole organization.
But yeah crowd-sourcing is a good way to do a second sifting through results. I know it is being used, by Google and others, already to classify video sources.
Why do site owners use Google CAPTCHA? Even Cloudflare uses it. I resent being forced to help Google when not even on a Google site. I won’t put any of my stuff on Cloudflare specifically because they force people to help train Google’s image recognition.
Because it's free, reasonably hard to beat by bots and reasonably low-effort for the user if they let Google track them (enabling the single-checkbox captcha).
A few days back, to allow me to download the software I had just bought, the site kept putting up those damned pictures for me to click on. Street signs were the first three, I apparently got all of those wrong (even though I got them right), shop fronts was the next lot (that's a little harder to work through, I can't tell Chinese shop fronts from Chinese warehouses by text alone) and I had two of those, then more street signs, and finally cars.
It took longer to confirm I was human than it did to download the software. My partner came through to see if I was alright, after I was shouting abuse at the computer for an extended period. She sat through one of them with me, confirmed that I had it right, then swore and walked away when it decided I was wrong.
If I'd known that it was going to screw me over that much, I would have recorded it and put the video on YouTube.
