As an actual human and not a bot, I had no idea how to answer. Is this a joke? (Seems not.) Is it a Magritte-like existential question? (It’s not a bicycle. It’s a drawing of a bicycle. Actually, it’s a photograph of a drawing of a bicycle. No, it’s really a computer image of a photograph of a drawing of a bicycle.) Am I overthinking this? (Definitely.) I stared at the screen, paralyzed, for way too long.
It’s probably the best CAPTCHA I have ever encountered; a computer would have just answered.
(In the end, I treated the drawing as a real bicycle and selected the appropriate squares…and it seemed to like that.)
AIs need data. Lots of data. WIth labels. This is a cat, that’s a horse, these letters are XYBOR, there’s a yield sign and this is a stop sign. Every captcha you do adds to the training data.
Captcha is a way of making life difficult for the innocent majority to foil a minority of miscreants. One of the worst human interfaces ever invented.
I have been using a user friendly interface of my own design that not a single bot has ever broken in over two decades. it’s user friendly, all it does is to ask the poster to read and verify his post before accepting it.