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In a way that is silly:

Increase the cost of having bots do it, while...

...also increasing the time wasted by humans. Time which is considered much more costly/valuable than whatever $ value spent on the bots.

So maybe the time has come to regard captcha's pointless, and just drop that nonsense.

That was true of early captchas but Google changed it from 'wasting humans time' to 'using humans time to train their machine learning algorirhms'

about to say the same - but to be clear, it is "training computer vision models" a specific use of machine learning

The difference between zero and nearly zero can be pretty large at scale.