[kernelbandwidth]

This is supposedly a feature and not a bug of CAPTCHA, at least according to the apocryphal story John Lafferty told me. IIRC, this was at CMU so he must have been referring to the 2003 CAPTCHA claim by von Ahn et al. The idea was primarily to stop spammers, but also secondarily to make them more useful. The argument was that if spammers managed to "break" CAPTCHA, then whatever technology was used to break it would necessarily be a useful (compared to 2003 knowledge) advance in AI, so it was a win-win whether it stopped spammers or just made them do free out-of-band research.

[username223]

Yes, back in the day, CAPTCHA was a good way to use human time trying to submit forms to both block spam-bots, and do useful work (e.g. label training data). This worked well when ML was bad at image recognition, but that's no longer the case. Unfortunately, as ML got better at the tasks, CAPTCHAs forced humans to do more work, and we're now at a point where either the machines are better, or it's not worth the humans' time. If your site has a CAPTCHA, there's a good chance I'll just close the tab and move on.

[_0w8t]

If one uses Google's capture, then most likely that capture already has enough data on you, so it doesn't ask anything.

[pixl97]

In this argument, how do we keep AI from destroying the internet?