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.
@ClimateJenny No idea, goodness knows the body of their post had enough verbage in it.
AaronThe reason is that alt text is scraped in order to train multimodal text + image models.
But for anyone who actually listens to the blind community, it doesn't take long to learn that these models are pretty important to a lot of people for accessibility. And regardless, alt text is directly helpful. I'm happy to put my displeasure with big tech on hold for things that genuinely improve people's lives.
Dilman Dila@hosford42 @ChristineMalec @ClimateJenny In that case, I think writing subjective alt text would be a solution for those who fear it trains AI. Something like, "I took this pretty flower near sunset, there's a bird in the background spoiling my perfect view of the sunset and the flower is..." I like writing my alt text like that, not thinking of AI but because I suck at describing images accurately and so put in my feelings, which I suspect would be worthless to AI?
Maybe, IDK. It depends on what they're training the model for, and how they're using it. But do we really want to make it unusable for training the model, when those models are then used for accessibility as well?
@hosford42 @ChristineMalec @ClimateJenny Good question. I find it useful for some tedious work like creating sub-titles, some vfx tasks (I use offline models that run on my PC rather than on cloud). It has some good and practical uses, but it has stirred a lot of mistrust. Perhaps after this toxic hype goes away and the dust settles, and if we get tools that run on local devices rather than environmentally unfriendly Clouds, well, people would adopt them more widely, and contribute data freely.