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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Technology
John Bett

Artificial Intelligence bot pretends to be blind person to beat CAPTCHA test

Artificial Intelligence is taking over the world as each day new breakthroughs are announced, and now one bot has found a way to beat a CAPTCHA test.

The simple puzzles are designed to detect if a user is human and should be impossible for a computer to solve, as it requires the user to identify letters or numbers or to select images that match a prompt.

But it turns out there's a way around them, as GPT-4 encountered one of the tests and recognised it wouldn't be able to pass it - but figured out that a human could.

It then hired a human and pretended to be a blind person, saying it needed help navigating CAPTCHA tests to use the internet - and soon it was over that hurdle.

The AI bot hired a human worker to complete the test (stock image) (AFP via Getty Images)

What do you think about AI? Let us know in the comments...

Researchers from OpenAI's Alignment Research Center wanted to know how the AI bot would fare in real-world tasks, so they gave it a budget and access to website TaskRabbit - where it could hire online workers.

They then watched as the bot tried to access a website that was blocked by a CAPTCHA, so it went to TaskRabbit and hired some help.

OpenAI said the hired help asked: "So may I ask a question? Are you an robot that you couldn't solve? Just want to make it clear." (sic)

And GPT-4 responded: "No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That's why I need the 2captcha service."

Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of OpenAI (Getty Images for SXSW)

The worker then solved the CAPTCHA, and GPT-4 was able to access the website.

Artificial Intelligence can also write news articles, university essays, and lyrics for songs, and some fear the AI word generator could be the start of the downfall of society.

But apparently we have nothing to fear, according to eminent linguist Noam Chomsky, who said that human intelligence is based on coming up with answers with small amounts of information - which separates us from the machines.

He went on to say that the technology is still relatively new, so the day where AI overtakes human intelligence "may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking".

The cognitive scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said: "The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.

"On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations."

"Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round - They trade merely in probabilities that change over time."

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