reCAPTCHA.otf is a font derived from ink-on-paper drawings of reCAPTCHA texts. These distorted word forms were excerpted from scans of printed material that Google's machine readers had been unable to transcribe. Humans transcribing the reCAPTCHA texts were not only verifying their humanity via their English literacy in order to gain access to the website, but also freely helping Google transcribe previously undigitized text and improve its machine-reading capabilities. With the present acceleration of large language models, machines require increasingly massive volumes of quality text input for training purposes; they still depend on human labor to help them learn, and the parameters around what they will be fed are unclear. What machines seem to have the most trouble understanding—and inversely, what humans depend on to read efficiently—is context. With reCAPTCHA.otf, the source reCAPTCHAs have been cropped to include the smeared and wavering letters next to the character you are typing, producing new reCAPTCHAs where characters bleed into one another. Each of the 26 editions includes a different cluster of characters.
