This Captcha

"Please select all images which evoke melancholy as opposed to existential dread."
- "choose the roads that fill you with ennui moreso than the avenues that give you a sense of listless"
- That’s like, your opinion man
  
  Please try again

I love how so many of these images meant to fool bots are literally generated by AI
- Because their real purpose is to train the bots. The captcha features are just there to get us to use it.
  
  It's more complicated than that. Only 2 or 3 images are meant to train AI, the rest are meant to establish whether you're human enough that AI can learn from you.

I'd be with you if it weren't so obvious.
- Doesn’t look like anything to me.

The most surprising thing is how you and some commenters dont see how obvious and dead simple the answer is
Like, should they show you a block of ice and a fire next time?
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  Am neurodivergent, didn't even occur to me they'd be talking about snow vs indoors. I thought because it is a visual test they meant color temp which for me registered as the middle left, center bottom, and maybe an argument for bottom right.
  
  Warm could also translate to "cozy" or overall "hue". Neither would necessarily pick the indoor photos. I don't think you need to be neurodivergent to be confused, maybe just a little more artistically minded.
  
  okay that one is understandable, thank you
  
  Thanks for reminding me of my neurodivergence, I couldn't figure it out either.
  I was starting to think "ok this one looks lit and cozy, and how am I supposed to tell how well insulated these houses are?"
- More surprising is how apparently some of you haven’t encountered captchas that employ nuance, and what seems like the obvious answer sometimes isn’t.
  
  my man, its a blizzard and indoors, what part of that has any more nuance than being beaten over the head with the answer
  
  The thing is that a captcha is made to be solvable by almost anyone.
  So whatever you think the answer is, is probably one of the many correct responses.
- It even clearly gives an example of a picture of a living room.
- Something that's obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to everyone.
- The most surprising thing is how you and some commenters dont see how obvious and dead simple the answer is
  Like, should they show you a block of ice and a fire next time?
  This is an incredibly narrow view of people, and what 'obvious' is. This sentence is absolutely awful if you're ESL in any way:
  Please select all images of one type that appear warmer in comparison to other images
  Even I stumbled for a second on that sentence. What the hell does 'appear warmer' mean? Colour, hue, saturation, is there a temperature reading on them? It can snow at zero degrees, but that middle image could be -20 for all we know; it's in shadow and the only non-cool-colour in it is that orange rectangle.
  I mean, to me, it's obvious that you add an apostrophe to 'don't' but you didn't. Your sentence also doesn't end with a period. Does that mean I get to call you out for missing such an 'obvious' thing, and insult you for not doing it? You know, how obvious and dead simple writing your sentence correctly would be.

I assume this just means "pick inside" without saying it directly. The sample photo is of an inside space. No? The two in the middle row, I assume, are the "correct" answer.
Often the correct answer is only half the puzzle - how you answer (mouse movement) also can be to determine things
- No, there's far more depth to that. The goal isn't for you to prove yourself human, the goal is to teach an AI how to "think more human".
  1, 2 and 7 are obviously cold. They're oustide, with no "warm" colour lighting.
  3 and 6 are both green houses, the green house could be considered "warm", but 3 has light on the inside. This is perhaps a test against AI readers. To a human, they both seem warm inside, but an AI might differentiate based on the lighting.
  9 is a dark brown house, but 8 is a light brown house that is illuminated by external lighting. This contrasts with 3 and 6, because 6 has external lighting but it does not illuminate much.
  4 and 5 are both internal shots. 4 is light and airy, meanwhile 5 is a bit more grey - but then, grey is the fashion these days.
  All in all this is a bullshit test made up by bullshit people looking to get a bullshit result, with which they hope to make money off of.
  You're working to help them make more money, meanwhile they don't pay you for your labor. They also collect data from your connection to their servers - as well as the website you're trying to access, you will almost certainly be connecting to at least 2 other servers to deliver this hcaptcha, and thanks to cooperation with the website host hcaptcha will triangulate the internet routing and fingerprinting information to attain a significantly accurate identification of you as an indvidual (which they will then consolidate with whatever other information they have).
  Much like a disgruntled worker might "phone it in", or work within the requirements of their paid employment, or "quiet quit"; you should limit and perhaps even poison the output you give in proportion to what you're being paid for your labor.
  The goal isn't to satisfy captcha, the goal is to get passed it while giving as little commercial value as they compensate you for.
  Your data has value. If it didn't, then Facebook and Google wouldn't be amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world. You own the value they establish themselves with, they just claim a license.
  
  Way to throw a shit fit over paying 5 seconds of labor to use a service

If you're wondering why does it seem so strange, it's because the learning model is actually hyper sophisticated now. It knows what a bus, a bicycle, and a sailboat looks like, now it's asking for comparative assessments of complex images. It clearly understands that snow is covering houses and that snow is cold.
- OK, but that doesn't explain why anybody thinks that this is good UX.

Great, now they expect you to be thinking about lighting temperature terms. People who don’t do photography or haven’t read light bulb boxes won’t know wtf this means.
- They could easily mean ambient temperature.
  
  The example shows an interior room which would indeed be warmer. There are two which could be what they want you to select.
- Don't overthink it. Just select the interior ones.
  
  Are you sure about that? Because I’m not. I would have to actually get this captcha and succeed or fail.

There's an example at the top along with the instructions.
This ain't exactly the Mississippi.

It's the "of one type" that gets me - to me that says I should be examining either the outdoor or the indoor pictures, not comparing between those two types of picture. So I should somehow pick the warmest outdoor or warmest indoor pictures.
- It clearly says to select images of one type, not examine images of one type.
  
  I would write it "Select all the images of the type which is warmer than the other type of image"
- I think it's just asking you to pick the indoor pictures because they don't have snow in them. The confusing wording is to trick AI trying to get through captchas.

I worry about commenters in this post that seem to take this as some sort of highly complex problem verging on philosophical rather than a silly little riddle to go through as fast as possible to get to the primary part of website.

That's exactly what the model is trying to learn.

Is it the one that's on fire?

It's the two that aren't outside in the snow.
- Exactly. Not that you would need it, but it even gives an example image showing the inside of a room lol

Whole lot of AIs in this thread.

Go home, robot, you're drunk

Numbering left to right, top to bottom, I think the answer should be 3, 5, 6, 9.
Fuck you for trying to get me to train your AI. If you want my work, fucking pay me.
Edit: To be clear, I think those answers would be most likely to almost seem correct to an alrgorithm, but actually break their objective for training.
- You think 3,6 and 9 are warmer than 4?
  
  I explicitly left out 4.
- 3, 4, 6, 8 surely.
  
  I'm serious, do not call my Shirley.
  3, 4, 6, 8 have the kind of lighting that a person might be drawn towards. The kind of thing they're trying to train AI towards. My answers are meant to seem like the kind that AI would accept as a human answer, while also being wrong to the human eye.
  It's 4D chess. You have to predict what the AI thinks you would think, and agree with that, while providing an objectionable answer to the things AI is uncertain about.
  If they want the right answer, they should be paying us for it. They're a business, labor shouldn't be free for them.

I always click randomly on the first 2 attempts to mislead the AI. Hopefully you did the same, and when the robots come to kill us the grease will freeze up and they won't be able to move.

You have to touch the screen. The one thing bots can't do.

Wait until it has us picking between Good images and Bad ones, to train the AI
- That is exactly what this is.
- "Please select all targets that should be shot before they have a chance to get away."

Why the hell are these needed
- To train ai models
  
  Yep, in this case they're trying to train an AI on more abstract or "human" characteristics like whether or not something appears warm. That's what these kinds of captchas are doing though, they're outsourcing AI training.
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I got one the other day that had the third column of images completely cut off on mobile. Didn't matter what browser I tried. I had to wait until I could get to a desktop to try and access the site.

Only number 3 conveys the concept of warmth to me. A wintry scene contrasted with orange tinged light visible through house windows is a classic trope to evoke warmth and cosiness. The interiors are undoubtedly a physically higher temperature at the location of the photographer, but that is not being communicated visually by the picture.
What "of one type" means, I have no clue.
- I think lack of snow could be communicating the higher temperature.
  
  Most pictures lack snow. You'd expect the interior of a room to lack snow. Lack of snow alone does not communicate anything unless it's in a context where you'd normally expect there to be snow.
  If I was a visual designer, and I was tasked with providing a picture to represent warmth, I might choose, I don't know; hands in mittens clutching steaming mugs of cocoa, a cat snoozing in front of a roaring fire, or what else? Welcoming light shining from the windows of a house in a snowy landscape! If I submitted a nondescript photo off of a real estate listing, and said "look bro! No snow", I'd be looking for a new job.

Theyre no longer trying to keep bots out. They're trying to keep humans out. This is exactly the type of thing a bot would be best at. They can probably tell you the estimated temperature to 3 decimal places of each picture.
- Turing tests aren’t just about knowing things that a human would. Bots giving a perfect answer where humans would struggle is a perfectly acceptable way to filter.
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- While it wouldn't be cost effective to write a bot to bypass this, many websites that are employing this hcaptcha are intentionally choosing the harder to solve questions to push VIP subscriptions and similar stuff.

ITT: lemmings who don't know about color temperature