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

True AI

[not-my-real-name]

I'll just bet that this is what leads to "true" artificial intelligence (whatever that is). Soon, we'll have completely automated agents trying to convince other completely automated agents to purchase stuff to enhance bits of biology that they don't have.

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.

how about...

[inzy]

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

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.

Dear Friend,

[drolli]

My father, a nigerian spammer passed away. He left an AI system on a server located in a datacenter. Sadly during the last phase of his life unpaid data transfer bills accumulated to a sum of $300000. I am already negotiating with the secret services of the word who want to buy this program for $10000000. I can't pay the data transfer bills, so i turn to you, a trustworthy AI reasearcher. For $300000 you get a share of $500000000 and the copyright to the source code.

sincerely yours,

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.