Does the Pole Count as a Traffic Light? My Login Depends on It.

Does the pole count as part of the traffic light?

This is apparently something a person needs to settle before being allowed into a website.

There’s a grid of blurry street photos. The instructions say to select every square containing a traffic light. Most of the light is in one square, but a tiny corner hangs into the next one. The pole continues down through two more.

Now what?

Somewhere beyond this intersection is the ordinary thing you came here to do. For the moment, though, you’re on the transportation committee.

The little checkbox seemed reasonable enough: I’m not a robot.

Fine. Happy to confirm. But then comes the photographic cross-examination, which suggests the checkbox was less a question and more an invitation to continue the investigation.

Select all the bicycles.

There’s a bicycle. There’s another bicycle. And there, at the edge of the image, is roughly an inch of tire.

Is that a bicycle? It’s certainly bicycle-adjacent. You wouldn’t list it for sale as a bicycle. But you also can’t honestly say there’s no bicycle in that square.

The website has asked a yes-or-no question and accidentally opened a philosophy department.

What makes this especially irritating is that people are actually pretty good at recognizing bicycles. Put one in front of a person and ask what it is. Generally, that goes well.

Cut the photograph into nine pieces, blur it, and make access to something depend on the answer, and suddenly an adult is leaning toward a screen thinking, “Could that be a railing?”

Then there’s the version where a new picture appears after you select one.

Oh. We’re replenishing the bicycles.

You thought you were clearing a small task. Instead, you’ve accepted a shift. Another street scene arrives, and you inspect it with the weary concentration of someone who has already found quite enough buses for one afternoon.

There’s a purpose behind these checks. Nobody wants automated junk pouring into every form on the internet. Fair enough.

But from the human side, it’s an odd arrangement. The system is suspicious of automation, so the person gets additional unpaid work.

And when it doesn’t accept your selections, there’s no useful discussion. You can’t explain that you included the square because the rear wheel clearly extended over the boundary. There’s no box marked I stand by my bicycle assessment.

You just get another chance to be human, preferably more accurately this time.

That’s the part worth staring at for a second. Hesitation, interpretation, mild confusion, getting distracted by whether the pole counts: those all seem like fairly convincing signs of a person.

Yet here we are, trying to demonstrate our humanity by agreeing precisely with a machine.

I’m leaving the pole unchecked. It knows what it did.