Christine MalecFor the first time in my life on Masto, I read alt text that made me wish the person hadn’t bothered. After a wordy post, they wrote in the alt text field something like, “I don’t really want to write alt text and train the AI for free, but okay, person holding a computer.” I’m going to assume they didn’t think about what a slap in the face this was to me, and possibly to anyone else who relies on alt text. 3 Times I started an acerbic reply and deleted it, but I’m still seething, so I’m asking anyone who is so disingenuous to just not bother; you’ll create less hard feelings that way.
Climate Jenny 2.1@ChristineMalec That’s weird. Why do they think it has anything to do with training AI? Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I thought alt text was for humans.
Scott@ClimateJenny @ChristineMalec It's helpful for humans but it isn't always written by them. For quite a while now there have been LLM-based services that'll write decent albeit sometimes bloated alt text on demand. Some are free, others are monetized, all seem to be considered Divisive by some folks who are too daft to see why that's useful.
Adrien Plazas@Scott @ClimateJenny @ChristineMalec The comment at the start of the alt text was about alt text suposedly being used to train imagine recognition AI, not about AI being used to describe an image.