[gambiting]

Am I the only person here who always entered absolute nonsense for the scanned word? The original reCaptcha had two words, one which was clearly generated and another which was clearly scanned - to "solve" the captcha all you needed to do was to enter the generated word correctly, the other could be literally anything. So I always entered banana or something similar for literally everything.

[mherdeg]

You're not the only person -- I have a friend who did this, also generally inserting silly words in the side he guessed was scanned from a book.

I have a hunch that von Ahn knew this would happen and the same scan is shown to multiple users before a word is chosen.