Alipr’s new picture based CAPTCHA system has pronounced me “probably human”. Here is a link to try out their new system. It looks very promising. There is an interesting article about it here. I had written about the recent compromise of existing popular CAPTCHA systems here.
It would be ironic if the war between the service providers and the spammers provides us some of the biggest advanced in AI in years.
It wouldn’t surprise me though. When I was doing AI research in the 80s a lot of what was being done had a definite “solutions looking for a problem” feel to it. What we are seeing now is very different. There is a very specific problem that is trying to be solved and there are very clear financial rewards. The spammers are trying to impersonate real people. The service providers know that spam bots in their system would clog it up and chase away the real, advertising revenue generating, people that want more of.
War is often a technology driver.
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