pictured: a terrible looking '3' even with 2-3 times the pixel density
look at that <. we had to live like this. That p.
I miss back when CAPTCHA prompts were training OCR software on bad scans of old books, instead of training LLMs on what a bicycle looks like.
I remember there used to be an image passed around on 4chan encouraging people to type the n-word for the word being used for training (you could always tell - the one to validate your input was distorted in a recognizable way, while the OCR training word looked a lot more like scanned text and would be accepted regardless of what you wrote).
I don't think it ever actually did anything, though. Drop in the bucket and whatnot.