Ask HN: Are we training Google's self-driving AI by using reCaptcha?

3 pointsburgerzzz2 comments

Am just curious, I can't help but feel like Google is using me to help train some sort of AI system when I click on crosswalks, street lights, cars, etc, often several times in the same day. Also, what are some of the alternatives to Google's reCaptcha?

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We do, actually... "Hundreds of millions of CAPTCHAs are solved by people every day. reCAPTCHA makes positive use of this human effort by channeling the time spent solving CAPTCHAs into digitizing text, annotating images, building machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems."

https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/

I doubt it. Self driving cars use Lidar and high resolution cameras to spot cars and road features. You're not going to help them by clicking on a tiny thumbnail. Remember, the captcha already "knows" the correct answers which is how it let's you through.

A tip: Do your captchas more slowly, pausing between clicks, and you'll see fewer of them. Google thinks humans are dumb and only a robot could blast through them, so it gives you more pages to solve if you answer too quickly.

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