Clive Thompson: I hate doing Google’s CAPTCHAs. Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.
But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason: The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing.
CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie. I think I’ve figured it out, and so now I present — The Six Reasons CAPTCHA Pictures Make You Feel Like Crap:
1. They’re devoid of humans.
2. The angles are all wrong.
3. They’re voyeuristic.
4. They look like crime-scene footage.
5. The grids on the photos are an alien’s-eye view of the world.
6. There’s very little nature.
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