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@rolle @MonaApp FWIW, some blind people seem to take LLM-generated alt text as a personal insult and a sign of contempt. There was a long discussion about AltBot (an auto-description generator) which resulted in the tool being taken down rather than offend people.
(I’ve found similar alt text generators often useful but they do usually require heavy editing of the text so as not to sound off-puttingly sloppish)
@tero Hmm, interesting. That sounds more like anti-AI or Mastodon HOA behavior than anything else. If the text is descriptive, would it really matter?
Naturally, if the text is incomplete or contains mistakes, those should be corrected, regardless of whether AI was used or not. But I honestly don't see how using a tool to streamline writing descriptive text is a bad thing in itself.
@tuukkao I can see how it's different if it's clearly all AI with no human effort at all, I don't enjoy reading those either. But if you can't really tell or a human has reviewed it, I think it's perfectly fine. Using AI alone shouldn't be a problem, it's more about how you use it.
It just sounds like some people want to ban AI for writing alt text altogether, and I think that's a bad idea. In this narrow scope, how is AI any different from OCR, which has been around forever? It's just a tool meant to help, nothing more.
@rolle The main criticism was that since the generator cannot know the intent of the poster, it can’t communicate the meaning of the picture in context, and so the description is meaningless.
(I don’t think many of the pics I post try to communicate any deep meaning and am not sure I would do that well anyway, and so just a plain description is fine. I usually cut out the overly descriptive parts though)
@rolle @MonaApp I think the question "does this improve life for everyone" is a pretty good minimum bar.
There are sometimes where I just want a literal description for the alt image. But I've also learned that the alt image is an opportunity for jokes, enhancements, and other amusements that we would miss out on with auto-generated descriptions.
Though, in a world where my options are between far too few descriptions and some fun, and comprehensive descriptions but less fun I'll take that one
@lashman @MonaApp Yes, it’s difficult on iPhone without dependencies. I have an app called Locally AI that runs chatbots with local LLMs on iPhone, but it downloads gigabytes of data inside the app, I doubt Mona would want to do that. However, a "set up your local OpenAI/ollama API endpoint URL here" option would be nice. That way, it would be possible to connect Open WebUI or LLM Studio (and similar tools) to the app.