from Hacker News

ChatGPT Has Captchas Now

by runxel on 7/8/24, 10:00 AM with 20 comments

I am a paying customer of ChatGPT. Today it started to give me "Are you Human?" tasks/captchas, where you have to rotate objects so they are showing in the same direction as the hand of a mannequin. However these tasks are not as easy as they seem, because the objects shown have no clear "forward" direction, so it took me couple of tries to get it done.

I am baffled by this. Not only, because I use the online website (= I am not using the API, like in a terminal), but also because I am logged in and a paying customer. Why am I getting asked if I am human?

The way this is executed makes me believe that this is actually a training tho, and not a captcha (to get to know what people believe "forward" means with certain objects).

https://imgur.com/a/aphJnMS

  • by FrenchDevRemote on 7/8/24, 11:02 AM

    There are multiple projects built to reverse engineer their API to avoid paying the API rates(it still makes economical sense to buy a subscription for this), it was obvious that they would have to increase their bot protections at some point.

    Regular captchas are easily solvable by multimodal LLMs, we're reaching a point where what's hard for software to solve is also hard for humans.

    At some point they'll probably have to charge by usage instead of a flat subscription.

  • by neontomo on 7/8/24, 10:49 AM

    or, to be even more cynical, it could be a method to artificially stall requests to keep up with increasing usage demand.

    i find these types of business practices really wrong, similar to when a service shows ads to paying customers or rewards customers (with discounts) when they're about to leave the service instead of rewarding loyalty.

    but ya know, we have a choice whether we use it or not. claude is comparable in ability these days btw.

  • by fma on 7/8/24, 12:55 PM

    I've been getting "unusual activity detected" practically every other prompt and it'd a hindrance on productivity. I only get it in the web app.

    It's not even every other new topic, but if I follow up I get stopped in my tracks...

  • by xdennis on 7/8/24, 1:06 PM

    I was in the same situation. I've canceled my subscription. You don't get much from the subscription. The fact that you don't even get captcha protection was enough to make me cancel.

  • by nickthegreek on 7/8/24, 2:38 PM

    A Captcha on a paying service would make me cancel that service.

  • by leobg on 7/8/24, 3:13 PM

    They trained their models by programmatically reading almost every website in existence. And here they are, checking that you are human.

  • by InsomniacL on 7/8/24, 1:00 PM

    > I am baffled by this. Not only, because I use the online website (= I am not using the API, like in a terminal)

    Why would this baffle you? API's are typically accessed programmatically, so there would be no human to solve the captchas.

    > I am logged in and a paying customer. Why am I getting asked if I am human?

    To prove that it's a Human accessing the interface and not a robot.

  • by perilunar on 7/8/24, 12:16 PM

    Why does it need visual CAPTCHAs — surely it can tell humans and bots apart itself?

  • by vunderba on 7/8/24, 5:00 PM

    It's not a perfect solution but you might consider using something like Jan and connecting an API key to GPT4.

    https://github.com/janhq/jan

  • by zihotki on 7/8/24, 4:32 PM

    I wonder how this capcha can be solved by a visually impaired humans. And what kind of challenge can be provided to such users so that it can be solvable by them and not by robots.