Writing this up again so I can pin it: AI is literally a fascist project. Friends don't let friends use it.
Before I go into this, there are two types of responses to this that I have taken seriously so far.
One I'll call HashTagNotAllAI, which yields the obligatory "sure", but has the same smell. I'll leave it at that.
The other is that an anti AI stance also throws some assistive technology under the bus, making such a stance intrinsically ableistic. The easy thing to do is to refer...
@jens also, hallucinating assistive technology is a really bad thing, especially if it is deemed "good enough" by abled people, and deployed instead of actually reliable assistive technology, because it is cheaper.
For example, the availability of image description software is used to justify no longer describing images. That is a step up from "helpfully" running image description software on your own site and not verifying the result (because it is obvious that no description exists), but still a lot worse than actually providing good descriptions that put the image into the context of the site, and highlight important points.
@GyrosGeier I actually find it difficult to write good image descriptions. The ones I write zero in on the point I want to make, but often omit details. In a way, that's a writing faux pas. In creative writing you learn "show, don't tell", and I do the opposite.
This isn't a counter-argument (nor an argument). All I want to do is acknowledge how hard it is to do well with assitance of this kind.
@jens that is a good description though: the details aren't important, but the point is. If you can't show because the recipient is vision impaired, then you need to tell.
My point is that while AI has its uses in assistive technologies, it is also inherently limited, so it's not a good direction to take research in assistive technologies in.
Jens Finkhäuser
Simon Richter
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