So I’d previously read about how reCAPTCHA were using humans as a free resource to help digitize texts that were failing to be digitized by OCR. So the CAPTCHA that you get asked is actually a word that couldn’t be recognized by the OCR software and you do the job the software couldn’t do.
However, the following story made me laugh given instead its ingenious use of humans to unknowingly crack the CAPTCHAs on behalf of the spammers they’re supposed to stop. So see smut … help the spammers create accounts to spam from … but digitize a historically important text too … all in one hit!