• KluEvo
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      5611 months ago

      huh

      That… Actually seems like not that bad of an idea (at least for forum/reddit/lemmy bots)

      Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

      • @saltesc@lemmy.world
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        1511 months ago

        Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

        Don’t you fucking tell me what to do!

        gets mace

      • @T156@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Wasn’t that basically the intention behind the Upvote and Downvote systems in Lemmy, StackExchange/Overflow, Reddit, or old YouTube? The idea being that helpful, constructive comments would get pushed to the top, whereas unhelpful or spam comments get pushed to the bottom (and automatically hidden).

        It’s just that it didn’t really work out quite the same way in practice due to botting, people gaming the votes, or the votes not being used as expected.

        • @Greenskye@lemmy.world
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          1511 months ago

          Yep the flaw is assuming that humans would actually select for constructive comments. It’s a case where humans claim that’s what they want, but human actions do not reflect this. We’d eventually build yet another ‘algorithm that picks what immediately appeals to most users’ rather than ‘constructive’. You’d also see the algorithm splinter along ideological lines as people tend to view even constructive comments from ideologies they disagree with unfavorably

          • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.world
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            211 months ago

            That’s just a flaw in implementation. Look at the system implemented by Slashdot, still works to this day.

      • @davidgro@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Bots on Reddit already steal parts of upvoted comments and post them elsewhere in the same post to get upvotes themselves (so the account can be used for spam later)

        Even with context they can be very difficult to spot sometimes.

      • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        Is it really such a bad thing when the humans that are unable to cooperate do not get access?

        • Baketime
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          311 months ago

          The title text on the comic

          And what about all the people who won’t be able to join the community because they’re terrible at making helpful and constructive co- … oh.

        • KluEvo
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          211 months ago

          Sometimes you might need an urgent answer (eg, overflowing sink or a weird smell coming from an appliance problem) and don’t have time to fill out a serious form

      • @new_guy@lemmy.world
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        411 months ago

        But what if someone else makes a bot not to answer things but to rate randomly if an answer is constructive or not?

  • @profdc9@lemmy.world
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    7311 months ago

    Everyone knows that the real purpose of CAPTCHA tests are to train computers to replace us.

    • @hex@programming.dev
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      3411 months ago

      This but unironically… The purpose literally is to train computers to get better at recognising things

      • @RobotToaster
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        1111 months ago

        Specifically to help train AI for Google’s self driving car division.

        • @grue@lemmy.ml
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          1011 months ago

          Specifically to force all of us to do unpaid labor for Google.

          Where’s my fucking paycheck‽

    • Draconic NEO
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      1811 months ago

      And also to frustrate people who use anonimization techniques including use of the Tor Network to get them to turn off their protections to be more easily fingerprinted.

    • @over_clox@lemmy.world
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      911 months ago

      The funniest part of that is the people designing the AI systems seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they’re slowly but surely trying to eliminate their own species. ☹️

      • @sheogorath@lemmy.world
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        1011 months ago

        Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

    • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I suppose it’s this paper. Most prolific author seems to be Gene Tsudik, h-index of 103. Yeah that’s not “someone”. Also the paper is accepted for USENIX Security 2023, which is actually ongoing right now.

      Also CS doesn’t really do academia like other sciences, being somewhere on the intersection of maths, engineering, and tinkering. Shit’s definitely not invalid just because it hasn’t been submitted to a journal this could’ve been a blog post but there’s academics involved so publish or perish applies.

      Or, differently put: If you want to review it, bloody hell do it it’s open access. A quick skim tells me “way more thorough than I care to read for the quite less than extraordinary claim”.

    • @Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You are overrating peer reviewing. It’s basically a tool to help editors to understand if a paper “sells”, to improve readability and to discard clear garbage.

      If methodologies are not extremely flawed, peer reviewing almost never impact quality of the results, as reviewers do not redo the work. From the “trustworthy” point of view, peer reviewing is comparable to a biased rng. Google for actual reproducibility of published experiments and peer-reviewing biases for more details

      Preprints are fine, just less polished

        • @Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Unfortunately not. https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

          Most peer reviewed papers are non reproducible. Peer review has the primary purpose of telling the editor how sellable is a paper in a small community he only superficially knows, and to make it more attractive to that community by suggesting rephrasing of paragraphs, additional references, additional supporting experiment to clarify unclear points.

          But it doesn’t guarantees methodology is not flawed. Editor chooses reviewer very superficially, and reviews are mainly driven by biases, and reviewers cannot judge the quality of a research because they do not reproduce it.

          Honesty of researchers is what guarantees quality of a paper

          • @C4d@lemmy.world
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            211 months ago

            Yes. A senior colleague sometimes tongue-in-cheek referred to it as Pee Review.

            • @Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              The downvotes to my comments shows that no many people here has ever done research or knows the editorial system of scientific journals :D

              • @C4d@lemmy.world
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                211 months ago

                There is some variation across disciplines; I do think that in general the process does catch a lot of frank rubbish (and discourages submission of obvious rubbish), but from time to time I do come across inherently flawed work in so-called “high impact factor” and allegedly “prestigious” journals.

                In the end, even after peer review, you need to have a good understanding of the field and to have developed and applied your critical appraisal skills.

                • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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                  511 months ago

                  And TBF just getting on arxiv also means you jumped a bullshit hurdle: Roughly speaking you need to be in a position in academia, or someone there needs to vouch for the publication. At the same time getting something published there isn’t exactly prestigious so there’s no real incentive to game the system, as such the bar is quite low but consistent.

                • @Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Absolutely. One needs to know what is reading. That’s why pre prints are fine.

                  High impact factor journals are full of works purposely wrong, made because author wants the results that readers are looking for (that is the easiest way to be published in high impact factor journal).

                  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/papers-high-impact-journals-have-more-statistical-errors

                  It’s the game. Reader must know how to navigate the game. Both for peer reviewed papers and pre prints

  • Overzeetop
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    4611 months ago

    There is considerable overlap between the smartest AI and the dumbest humans. The concerns over bears and trash cans in US National Parks was ahead of its time.

  • @Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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    3811 months ago

    Curious how this study suggesting we need a new way to prevent bots came out just a fews days after Google started taking shit for proposing something that among other things would do just that.

  • @tacosplease@lemmy.world
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    3111 months ago

    Just encountered a captcha yesterday that I had to refresh several times and then listen to the audio playback. The letters were so obscured by a black grid that it was impossible to read them.

  • @C4d@lemmy.world
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    2611 months ago

    I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?

    • @Odelay42@lemmy.world
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      1311 months ago

      Yes, but that’s more of a side quest for the system. Primary use case has always been security.

      • Heresy_generator
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        Maybe. Or maybe it was always about using millions of hours of free labor to tune their algorithms and “bot detection” was just how they marketed it to the people that added it to their sites. Makes me wonder who was running the bots that needed to be protected against. Exacerbate the problem then solve the problem and get what you really want.

  • Rhaedas
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    2011 months ago

    So just keep the existing tests and change the passing ones to not get access. Checkmate robots.

    Just kidding, I welcome our robot overlords…I’ll act as your captcha gateway.

  • @dan1101@lemm.ee
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    1411 months ago

    So is it time to get rid of them then? Usually when I encounter one of those “click the motorcycles” I just go read something else.

    • @T156@lemmy.world
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      1311 months ago

      It’s a double-edged sword. Just because it doesn’t work perfectly doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

      To a spammer, building something with the ability to break a captcha is more expensive than something that cannot, whether in terms of development time, or resource demands.

      We saw with a few Lemmy instances that they’re still good at protecting instances from bots and bot signups. Removing captchas entirely means erasing that barrier of entry that keeps a lot of bots out, and might cause more problems than it fixes.

  • Kichae
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    1011 months ago

    Bots picking the questions, bots answering them. They clearly understand whatever the fuck the captcha bot thinks a bus is better than I do.