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

how about...

[inzy]

using spammers to create AI which allows us to catch/ignore/prevent spamming?

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

If CAPTCHAs do continue, I'd like the next problem to be facial recognition software. I'd love a package that could look at a picture and tag it "Nicholas and Andrea" or "Glen and Helene". Digital camera software everywhere could benefit from this technology. Not sure how you'd bake that into a CAPTCHA, but it's a good problem to solve.

How about this: The user is presented with a short message that they have to mark as "Spam" or "Not Spam". If the spammers get really good at solving this problem, they've effectively written themselves out of a job. And if they can't do it, then they can't get new accounts.