Yes, I believe that to be case-- CAPTCHAs are supposed to thwart script kiddies from creating bots which would do something on a website repeatedly to reap the benefits in an unfair way.
Definition from this webpage:
The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.
Having said that, now that we have AIs that are already insanely powerful, I find it hard to believe that today's AIs cannot solve the commonly used CAPTCHAs that annoy us and are eating away at our most valuable asset: time.