At this point, CAPTCHAs feel designed […] training image models
It was never a secret:
The reCAPTCHA program originated with Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, and was aided by a MacArthur Fellowship. An early CAPTCHA developer, he realized “he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles”
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It was never a secret:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA#Origin
I was fine with it when it was wavy text to digitise old works. This shit is just asinine and a time sink.
Yeah… only OCR and AI have advanced to the point where a spammer/bot can easily bypass them.
20+ years ago, Microsoft proposed a [Penny Black project](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)), which was superseded by reCAPTCHA. Nowadays, we might have to go back to that… maybe by mining crypto as a proof of effort.
Proof of work. See mCaptcha and Friendly Captcha.