The purpose of a captcha, and the purpose of the implementation of a captcha don’t need to be the same thing. Said differently, a given thing can fulfill multip

The purpose of a captcha, and the purpose of the implementation of a captcha don’t need to be the same thing. Said differently, a given thing can fulfill multiple roles and that isn’t an inherent contradiction nor is it wrong. In this case: yes, the stated purpose of a captcha is to identify humans - ie, legitimate users. The unstated purpose of ReCaptcha (at least) is to train AI. But it does both simultaneously. The funniest thing to me is that we’re all in on it. :)