Job applications already get inunduated with hundreds, thousands of candidates, of which 90% are bots submitting for canddiates. Some companies are resorting to the dreaded video submissions to filter that out, but even that may not be safe long term.
Photos may not be the final solution to this flood of automation, but it's being dabbled with.
cheap is part of the factor here. Pictures aren't expensive to generate, but are a magnitude more expensive than generating a bunch of text. Meanwhile, pictures are trivial for humans to verify against a simple search.
Internet is rapidly becoming a pile of steaming shit already, captchas were annoying but now it seems the "are you a robot" test is coming everywhere, what a sad state of affairs. I wonder how much of the overall traffic is automated, 80%? 90% ?