It's an ethical distinction for some. I am completely fine with a type of captcha that helps improve some public domain or free/libre licensed resource (e.g., proofreading words scanned from public domain works). I am not okay with helping some megacorporation sanitize their proprietary database or training their machine learning neural networks for free.

As mentioned elsewhere in this topic; I'd much rather spend some of my free time to help improve OpenStreetMap (and I do).

But what if it's a generic captcha. It doesn't improve anything. Are you okay with that?

A generic captcha doesn't use the work done by the user. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think I can guess what could be their answer.

What would it be? It's not clear to me.

Going from throwing away the work to improving Google's image recognition is a Pareto improvement so I'm interested in the justification.

But to me this is not a Pareto improvement (i.e., this is subjective). I consider the bolstering of the hold Google (and Apple, and Amazon, and Microsoft) has over a number of common domains (and in a broader sense our lives) to be undesirable and unethical. So when I correctly teach Google's proprietary image recognition software what a traffic sign, mountain, store front (ugh, these are the worst), or tree is, I am (even in the strict economic sense of a Pareto improvement) harming myself.

Ah. All Right. Thanks.

Not everyone is using the same ethical model as you?

Probably. If they were why would I ask them to justify their position? It would trivially correspond with mine.

Imagine you're at an airport and an inspector takes your batteries out of your luggage. All other things being equal, does it matter if he tosses them in the trash, or keeps them for his personal use?

From one perspective it doesn't matter - your batteries are gone either way.

But from another perspective, inspectors who keep what they find have completely different motivations - making the same outcome much more sinister and corrupt.

It makes sense there because the actual consequences are undesirable. What are the undesirable consequences we're incentivising here? That Google will cover the entire web in captchas?

That Google gets an unfair advantage compared to other companies, making it harder to start a new company able to compete with Google on Machine Learning? (Which is already impossible, because Google uses the knowledge from ReCaptcha, GMail, etc unfairly)

For a more accurate money analogy: Imagine he resells them.

this comes to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7fE9_7_7A