Mastodawn

Get loads of boosts on Fedi with this one weird trick!

Alt-text your images!

@Nickiquote alternately don't put ALT text on and get comments!

... amazed though we don't get AI haters saying that you 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 put ALT text on anything because it's great for AI training data

Show thread

Damon L. Wakes Jan 22

@UP8 @Nickiquote I've seen a bunch of people post images with alt-text that was clearly AI-generated because it's obviously wrong, so I'm not too worried about anyone getting quality training data out of it.

Show thread

Paul Houle

@DamonWakes @Nickiquote it's funny, Google Lens actually does a good job of writing captions for things, I use it all the time to take pictures of things with Chinese text (like snacks that have a street scene with a banner that says "City God Temple Street") and then get into discussions about how they made up Chinese characters for chemical words like "Phenol" and "Aldehyde"...

Show thread

Nick Jan 22

@UP8 @DamonWakes I have heard people suggesting that you also add nonsense poetry to the useful alt text to mess with AI. How unsighted people feel about such nonsense, I don’t know. It would annoy me.

Show thread

Paul Houle Jan 22

@Nickiquote @DamonWakes personally I don't have a lot of respect for the AI hate/hype discourse today because I lived it all 10 years ago trying to build systems like that before the technology was ready! From my perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co. was the best court case ever even if it meant there was I time I was flooded with phony phone books

Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. - Wikipedia

Show thread

Damon L. Wakes Jan 22

@UP8 @Nickiquote I genuinely don't know what's producing the examples I've seen because it's way worse than you'd expect nowadays. It tends to be on gifs so my best guess is there's some Giphy-type service that provides attached alt-text that's all the work an earlier, terrible tool.