Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems

An anonymous reader writes "With bots getting closer to beating text-based CAPTCHAs for good, New Scientist points out that when they do, OCR technology will at least have advanced. The article goes on to suggest that whatever kind of reverse Turing Test that comes next should be chosen to motivate spammers to solve other pressing AI problems, such as image recognition. Are there any other problems that criminal crowdsourcing could help with?"

Comments

But will they share their code?

[dameepster]

Spammers are unlikely to share their results with the rest of the world. They're motivated by financial rewards, and there is absolutely no incentive to publicize their methodology in any format.

Not only would the "good guys" learn from it -- and thus potentially defeat the spammers' discovery -- but other spammers would simply steal their work.

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But has it?

Unfortunately, CAPTCHA is radically easier than actual OCR. When cracking a CAPTCHA, achieving a success rate of 5-10% is absolutely fine. Plus, when you submit your answer, you are told whether or not you got it right. With OCR, anything short of high 90's is pretty much useless, and the only feedback available is through manual human intervention, which scales poorly.

Arguably, the only significant OCR advance has been RECAPTCHA, which is just a clever way of making humans do the hard stuff in a way that actually helps, rather than just using makework problems.

It is certainly true that CAPTCHA cracking has advanced considerably, that just doesn't apply too neatly to real OCR problems.