Captchas are for free image recognition training, not verifying humanity. My ability to identify fire hydrants is not what makes me human.
When captchas were first a thing computers couldn’t do them yet so for a very brief period of time they were effective at filtering robots. I can believe that some poor Google engineer from 2009 or whatever didn’t realize the implication of what they were creating.
The earliest ones that asked you to type a word were also used to help digitize the Google Books library, for cases when the OCR wasn’t quite able to match a word confidently. That’s why you’d get a pair, one that was clearer but “jumbled” to be unreadable to computers, the other looked more like a fuzzy scan (or occasionally just a complete mess of misplaced ink), though both had a wavy effect applied to them. Only the clearer one was needed to pass the test, the other was just free training for their OCR process.
Bloody peasant!
Well, it doesn’t matter how many times I click every scrap of bicycle or motorcycle, or stairs, or crosswalks, Google still doesn’t think I’m human.
Google is the sociopathic and parasitic stalker that’s the serial mass murderer.
