Not quite.
It’s mostly wisdom of the crowd, as it always has been.
As long as you mostly click the same squares most other people click, you pass.
You often at random get 2-3 images because 2 of them are actual checks, but the third is a new image that you auto pass and they’re using it to gather data on what the average clicks are on it.
Well yeah, I’d hope so, that’s the entire point.
Catcha’s data collection always was with the intent for training ai on these skills. That’s “the point” of them.
It’s reasonable to expect that the older version of captchas can now be beaten by modern ai, because they’re often literally trained on that exact data to beat it.
Captcha effectively is free to use on websites as a tool because the data collection is the “payment”, they then license that data out to people like OpenAI to train with for stuff like image recognition.
It’s why ai is progressing so fast, captchas are one of humanity’s long term collected data silos that are very full now.
We are going to have to keep progressing the complexity of catches as it will be the only way to catch modern AIs, and in turn it will collect more data to improve it.