I still use to think that captchas are used to train some image recognition software.
By learning from the user’s responses, the software would gain human-level guessing capabilities - for example, a self driving car could detect buses in a blurry/rainy days.
There’s some truth to that but our algorithms and datasets have advanced in the last few years. Especially since the CNN + Transformers revolution. Many large well labeled datasets available for things on the road or home.
So one could say, the computers have learnt the basics enough to do a better job at captchas than humans can.
This will keep on getting better (or worse depending on the perspective) I.e machines will edge more and more into what humans exclusively were good at that it made economical sense to use computers.
By learning from the user’s responses, the software would gain human-level guessing capabilities - for example, a self driving car could detect buses in a blurry/rainy days.