That was definitely not the original point of the captcha. It used to be every site implementing their own version, some better than others, but all were just solving something that should be easy for humans and almost impossible for bots. But then Google got the idea of using it for crowdsourcing to help with digitizing books and they launched reCAPTCHA. This was easy to embed on any web page and served a noble purpose, so it quickly became the de facto captcha over much of the web. Fast forward several years and now we’re all providing free work in training AI object recognition, a problem AI is already very good at, which means the images we’re being given are increasingly more difficult for humans to interpret.