Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing

They force you to look at the world the way an AI does

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. Here’s a typical one …

You can feel your spirits deflate just beholding this picture, can’t you? Even worse, really, are the jumble of bleak images …