By breaking CAPTCHAs and other anti-spam measures, spammers are inadvertently solving artificial intelligence problems. So, New Scientist asks, why not deliberately set spammers problems you want to be solved, and have their efforts and resources be unwillingly brought to bear on something useful?

Spammers have already written software able to match humans at some CAPTCHAs. But when CAPTCHAs finally fail, their co-creator Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University says there will be reason for celebration as well as concern.

Software that can solve any text-based CAPTCHA will be as much a milestone for artificial intelligence as it will be a problem for online security.

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“If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great – they have solved an AI problem,” says von Ahn. The criminal underworld has created a kind of X prize for OCR.

That bonus for artificial intelligence will come at no more than a short-term cost for security groups. They can simply switch for an alternative CAPTCHA system – based on images, for example – presenting the eager spamming community with a new AI problem to crack.

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