I just noticed that whenever I get a captcha to prove I'm human, it's always images from the street.. cars, crosswalks, traffic lights, trucks, bikes, tractors etc etc...
I just want to know... Who's ML model I've been helping to train for the last i don't know how many years?!? 😤

I should've realized something smelled funny the moment i understood that a bot is asking me to prove my humanity to it, by doing something that a bot should be able to do by now.

Though your question is rhetoric enough, if it is ReCaptcha, it is Google's services

Google's.

And there's bots that can beat recaptcha most of the time now. They're on github.

As @asgs said. Recaptcha is a google service which help train their image recognition.

Some of the images will be pre evaluated and some are un prepared.

But it also compares multiple “human” inputs to create a truth.

Before images they used hard to read words and that was to train their text parsing. One word was a known one and one was pulled from their scanning of books where their algorithm was unsure of what it meant.

A bit like amazons mechanical turk.

I wonder how accurate their models actually are. I wouldn't expect humans to be very good at solving the task. I would expect the model to perform like a half-assed human.

Even a simple captcha can stop 90% of simple bots, it is certainly possible to bypass captcha by sophisticated bots, but, these bots are expensive. Even if the Recaptcha is not 100% accurate, it's successful in stopping bots that can't even try to bypass it.

the real captcha might not be the image recognition itself but maybe your mouse behavior, reaction times and such.