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.
The Tattooed Nonna 🧙♀️@hosford42 @ChristineMalec @ClimateJenny if people don't want to train ai they probably shouldn't post anything online
This is how far you'd have to go to actually stop it from happening. Or at least you can't post *publicly* without it happening.
This is not to say that it's right for that to be the case, or that it's the individual's responsibility to curb bad behavior from these corporations. We need laws for that. But if people are going to take it upon themselves to disrupt this behavior, picking on alt text in particular is severely misguided.