ReCaptcha, what is it doing?

​I used to get those annoying ReCaptcha grids a lot more. You know, the ones where you have to pick all the squares that have a bicycle, or a car, or a bus, or, whatever. I get those less these days, though there are still websites asking me to prove I’m human. An existential question that I don’t imagine can ever be answered by a 4x4 grid, still, one worth asking.

​There are other ways to prove me human now, like the dog picture in the 2 circles and I have to line it up to make a proper dog picture. Why did websites start doing that and when will it end? I don’t know when it’ll end, but as ‘bots’ get better at doing that sort of identification, I suppose the puzzles will get more complicated.

As to why, I can tell you that. I sort of did. But here’s a Chat GPT answer from that very question:

reCAPTCHA is a security feature developed by Google that helps to protect websites from spam and abuse. It uses a variety of techniques to verify that a user is a human rather than a bot, such as image recognition and puzzle-solving tasks. reCAPTCHA is commonly used on websites to prevent automated bots from submitting forms or accessing restricted content.
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I had wondered that. It sort of seems obvious, but why it seemed to mistake me as a bot, I do not know. Sometimes I had to do those puzzles 4 or 5 times.
I’m including a YouTube video of that really upbeat science lady that has some great info on all sorts of things, this one is about ReCaptcha:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI
 You should watch the video, it's good.
 
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