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The recent captcha upgrade that asks you to select all X in the pictures is horribly confusing. When it asks you to select all cakes and then shows cakes, pies, cupcakes, etc.. it is horribly ambiguous what the heck it means by cake. The Pasta one is just as bad. No educated human can be asked to discern whether a Tai vermicelli is considered a pasta dish or not. Every time I get a new one of these, I end up scratching my head wondering just

"what in the heck is this asking me to select based on the thumbnails it provides?"

This thing probably needs a lot more work before going prime-time. I get the gist of it, but at this point, it is simply more confusing than useful. Can you provide an option to just revert to the normal captcha text while this matures?

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  • 67
    So you ARE a robot?
    – nhgrif
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 18:19
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    Hmm, maybe these food related questions should be posted on Seasoned Advice. They can give you all the distinctions of food types and subtypes that you need.
    – ryanyuyu
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 18:25
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    I'm afraid I'm going to fail it every time for exactly this reason, although I haven't yet out of the dozen or so I've done. I would guess, though I have no proof, that two or three of the images each time are dummies. That they are not part of the test, but are themselves being tested, to be categorized for later tests. Hopefully that will lead to better pictures being presented?
    – jscs
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 18:37
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    If you're asking for cake, you can't show cupcakes as the false image. Go with hammers. It seems like the ambiguity could be removed by ensuring the positive images come from a remotely different subject set than the negative ones.
    – Chris Baker
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 19:24
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    I wonder if Google selects those images by using Google Image search for cake and not cake respectively.
    – poke
    Commented May 8, 2015 at 6:24
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    pbs.twimg.com/media/CEHNCFNW0AIhwPW.jpg? pbs.twimg.com/media/B-Ih-gwIgAAK4kU.jpg?
    – Spikatrix
    Commented May 8, 2015 at 6:38
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    I've never seen those captchas - but would they eplain the difference between a cake, a pie and a cupcake to people who don't have English as their first language? Why not ask to distinguish between Kuchen , Torten and Pasteten?
    – piet.t
    Commented May 8, 2015 at 7:05
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    Just think of the poor cyborgs: thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/…
    – Yakk - Adam Nevraumont
    Commented May 10, 2015 at 3:00
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    Cupcake won't be glad to hear this!
    – TLama
    Commented May 10, 2015 at 7:26
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    jaffa-cakes.com/jaffa-cakes-biscuits-name
    – Flexo - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented May 10, 2015 at 11:15
  • Related captchas about food: What kind of food is referred to as “sushi” in English? , Is a hamburger considered a sandwich?
    – Spikatrix
    Commented May 24, 2015 at 6:36
  • Steam recovery has this. I can't login. :-(
    – djangofan
    Commented Oct 3, 2020 at 17:12

4 Answers 4

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See this Kaggle competition where winners over a year ago are getting computer learning algorithms that can discern cats from dogs with 98% accuracy. This level of accuracy is available to many people working in computer vision nowadays, and progress is still being made year-on-year in the field.

The new CAPTCHA vision tasks appear to be trying to circumvent that by changing the subject matter a lot between tasks. But that means more data, and by the looks of it, lower quality data.

The robots are going to win this one. Image classification CAPTCHAs have only a few years to go. The lower quality of the current crop is a sign of the losing battle.

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    I stopped logging in to network sites that want me to prove I'm not a robot. Don't really want to train Google's AI for free...
    – Simon D
    Commented Mar 26, 2017 at 7:53
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As far as I can tell, this isn't an SO specific thing, but a problem with these new Captchas overall. I agree that they're confusing. I've seen a sandwich one that's particularly difficult to discern. I end up brute forcing it which seems pretty counter productive to me.

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To someone who is blind and deaf, CAPTCHA renders a website completely unusable. To someone who is dyslexic, CAPTCHA may render a website completely unusable. To someone with poor vision, CAPTCHA may make gaining access more trouble than it's worth. We have review queues for all sorts of things. Maybe we can add something like that to administer a Turing test.

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  • Note: the CAPTCHAs are used to rate-limit searches as well.
    – Nathan Osman
    Commented May 23, 2015 at 21:16
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In the spirit of better late than never... :)

Although the version of reCAPTCHA we use now can still show a set of images, most of the time there should be no need to do anything to pass it except for clicking the "I'm not a robot" checkbox. Unfortunately we can't control the quality/legibility of what Google serves up here, but there are additional controls to request a new image or use the audio version:

"select all images" captcha example

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  • In the case of "Steam account recovery", the audio captcha says it is not currently working and so catch-22. I'm locked out.
    – djangofan
    Commented Oct 3, 2020 at 17:13

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