Technically somewhat true. Their source material is fragments of books being OCR'd that their program had issues on, some of which are literally impossible (I'v

Technically somewhat true. Their source material is fragments of books being OCR'd that their program had issues on, some of which are literally impossible (I've seen math equations that require non-unicode characters). On top of this, they add extra distortions. BUT! These are actually easy to solve. reCAPTCHA will give you two words, only one of which it knows the ground truth on (it's using you to solve the other). It will accept any gibberish for the one word it doesn't know. I've made a point of trying to guess which one is the 'real' captcha (usually the more-distorted one), but next time you see Cyrillic or an integral, just mash the keyboard.