SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Maybe they should change the button to say, "I am a robot"?
On Friday, OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent, which can perform multistep tasks for users, proved it can pass through one of the Internet's most common security checkpoints by clicking Cloudflare's anti-bot verification—the same checkbox that's supposed to keep automated programs like itself at bay.
[...]
a user named "logkn" of the r/OpenAI community posted screenshots of the AI agent effortlessly clicking through the screening step before it would otherwise present a CAPTCHA (short for "Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart") while completing a video conversion task—narrating its own process as it went.
[...]
The absurdity of an AI agent declaring it needs to prove it's "not a bot" while clicking through anti-bot measures has not been lost on observers. "In all fairness, it's been trained on human data why would it identify as a bot? We should respect that choice," joked one Reddit user in a reply.
[...]
Cloudflare's screening system, called Turnstile, often precedes actual CAPTCHA challenges and represents one of the most widely deployed bot-detection methods today. The checkbox analyzes multiple signals, including mouse movements, click timing, browser fingerprints, IP reputation, and JavaScript execution patterns to determine if the user exhibits human-like behavior. If these checks pass, users proceed without seeing a CAPTCHA puzzle. If the system detects suspicious patterns, it escalates to visual challenges.
[...]
OpenAI's Operator, an experimental web-browsing AI agent launched in January, faced difficulty clicking through some CAPTCHAs (and was also trained to stop and ask a human to complete them), but the latest ChatGPT Agent tool has seen a much wider release.It's tempting to say that the ability of AI agents to pass these tests puts the future effectiveness of CAPTCHAs into question, but for as long as there have been CAPTCHAs, there have been bots that could later defeat them. As a result, recent CAPTCHAs have become more of a way to slow down bot attacks or make them more expensive [PDF] rather than a way to defeat them entirely. Some malefactors even hire out farms of humans to defeat them in bulk.
[...]
CAPTCHAs are just one example of the complex tasks ChatGPT Agent can handle. For example, another Reddit user showed off a photo of a load of groceries that Agent apparently purchased. "I had agent mode order me some groceries from a local supermarket while I worked yesterday for pickup this morning," the Reddit user wrote.
[...]
But ChatGPT Agent isn't perfect. Some terrible website user interfaces are apparently better than CAPTCHA checkpoints at foiling the new bot. "Your agent did way better than mine," wrote one Reddit reply. "Mine couldn't figure out how to get to the stop and shop website."
Related stories on SoylentNews:
Six Weeks of CloudFlare Stalling; Still Blocking Niche Browsers - 20250315
AI Bots Now Beat 100% of Those Traffic-Image CAPTCHAs - 20241003
Artificial Intelligence Smart Enough to Fool Captcha Security Check - 20171028
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday July 31 2025, @07:42AM (4 children)
We see this comment frequently. However, I think that it is unfair so I checked the last 5 days of stories. Out of a total of 25 stores, 3 have been AI related. Two days had none whatsoever, and 3 days had a single AI story on each day. The other 22 stories have covered a very wide variety of topics.
Now if you have to look at what is being discussed most on the sites that we check for stories. If you guessed that it was AI then you would be correct. But we reject most of them because they are simply repeating what has been said before.
You do not have to read every story. Many people ignore stories that don't interest them particularly, but the hits indicate that some people do read them, even those that you might not.
It is not the editors' task to find the stories, but only to prepare and schedule them for publication on our site. It is the community's job to submit them. Some people do. We have made it as easy as we can. From IRC we can accept just a URL and we have software that will take care of everything else for you ("=submit URL" - it couldn't be made any easier, could it?). "Arthur the bot" finds over 300 stories each day - but the majority are not what you want to read. They are little more than poorly disguised advertising. The "'best price' for buying 'X'", "10 reasons why you should buy the latest smartphone offering from some unknown Chinese maker", or "Why I take a spare laptop charger on holiday with me..." etc. So I have to select the original stories of interest (that aren't behind a paywall, that do not contain more US political abuse of the 'other' party, and that can be placed into one of our existing topics - however tenuously that link might be!) from that list of 300+ and submit them myself. That task alone takes me over 1 hour of every day.
They are then subjected to the editors' scrutiny. Yet more stories are weeded out as being unsuitable, or being duplicates of a story that we have already covered. Those that are left might make it to the front page.
However, many of you work in very diverse fields. You must be seeing stories and journals that are relevant to your profession. We realise that you probably find them repetitive or even boring - but we haven't even seen or heard of them. Push a link our way and we can do whatever we can to make sure that the things that are relevant to you become a story worth discussing for everyone else.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday July 31 2025, @07:48AM
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday July 31 2025, @11:44AM (2 children)
I just want to thank you guys for not posting endless streams of stories about AI like some other sites do. Stories about every little trivial use or mis-use of "AI", all trying to glorify it, gets beyond obnoxious.
It's fine when there is something of use to the community. Heck, I can even think of a use for an agent that can manipulate web pages or applications. At work I have to manually fill in fields in a slow, repetitive database web application because the assholes won't give me access to the backend or data load functionality and any web scripting would break every month when they change things all around. It would save me a LOT of time if I could grab a spare computer and tell some agent to "change field X from A to B in all records of this report", as half-assed as that is, that would save me a lot of time.
BTW, I read the original comment's "this site" as referring to a site that asks for verification that one is human, which is not (yet) Soylent. A particular green sites asks me that EVERY TIME I connect, and additional times if it sends me to one of the sub domains.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday July 31 2025, @01:51PM (1 child)
Thanks for your reply. Trying to find the right balance is not easy, and it is impossible to please everyone all of the time.
So did I - which is why I made the second comment explaining why I had responded the way I had.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dr Spin on Sunday August 03 2025, @08:14PM
As the OP, Yes - I was addressing websites with Captchas - which I struggle with because the images tend to be of such poor resolution, because the language is typically American, and because the use of language is American too: when they say images containing "bicycles", as a well educated, elderly Brit - I expect this to mean "multiple entire bicycles", not a small fragment of something that, might possibly have once been part of a bicycle or a motorcycle. As for "Sidewalks - I expect them to be confined to the premises of the Ministry of Silly Walks in the interests of public safety and security.
My English Language teacher would have had the author of this twaddle sentenced to a considerable period of detention in which they had to write "I do not intend to continue being an illiterate for the rest of my life" 3,000 times.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!