alt Hacker NewsGoogle at least uses captchas to gather training data for computer vision ML models. That's why they show pictures of stop lights and buses and motorcycles - so they can train self-driving cars.
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theptip • 08/01/2025
That’s not the original purpose of Captchas, it’s just a value-harvesting exercise, given that Google is doing a Captcha anyway. Other Captcha providers do a simple Proof of Work in the browser to make bots economically unviable.
From https://www.vox.com/22436832/captchas-getting-harder-ai-arti...:
“Correction, May 19 [2021]: At 5:22 in the video, there is an incorrect statement on Google’s use of reCaptcha V2 data. While Google have used V2 tests to help improve Google Maps, according to an email from Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project), the company isn’t using this image data to train their autonomous cars.”