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Here’s Why CAPTCHA Shows You Traffic Pictures

Ever had your browsing disrupted by a CAPTCHA prompting you to click on all the buses, traffic lights, or stop signs? You’ve probably noticed that CAPTCHA likes asking you to click on driving-related images, as opposed to making you identify all the kittens or pandas in a picture. There’s a reason for that, and it all leads back to Big Tech.

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What is CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA is short for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” You’re likely to take a CAPTCHA when registering an account, making a purchase, or posting a comment, because CAPTCHAs are meant to weed out spambots from real users. Therefore, it takes a human-specific skill to pass the test — like the ability to accurately identify signs and vehicles on the road.

Using data from humans

While bots currently fall a bit short when it comes to picking out things on the road, this is a teachable moment for AI. According to speculation by tech experts, every time you’re asked to look at a picture and click all the squares that contain a stop sign, you could be tutoring a future self-driving car — particularly, a Google-owned Waymo car.

Google has used this method before. Remember the old days, when completing a CAPTCHA was just interpreting distorted words and typing them out? That data was used to help improve Optical Character Recognition technology, which allowed Google Books to digitize paper-based texts. Then, CAPTCHA went through a phase where it made users interpret house numbers and street signs. That data went to work improving Google Street View.

Waymo weighs in

Waymo explains that it uses many methods to teach its cars the rules of the road, such as data from DNNresearch, which uses algorithms for visual classification instead of human effort. However, Michael Cutter, who holds a PhD in Computer Engineering, speculates that the CAPTCHA data is being used to double-check the AI’s work.

So, the next time you have to stop and click all the buses, just know that you’re making the roads of tomorrow just a little bit safer.

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Source: Ceros