Hi!
While I really enjoy seeing many of my fellow man being accommodating to people with disabilities. I find manually transcribing every image I post to be very tiring.
I thought that I could at least use some sort of AI to help with image transcripts, tho, that could probably be better used by the actual person with the disability.
So thats the question, should I skip the transcribing of an image or let an AI do it?
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Give it a test and see how accurate it is, if it’s good enough then go ahead. People have been using AI-based OCR for literal decades already, nothing has fundamentally changed. There’s just a sudden moral panic about it lately.
it’s not a sudden, unexplained moral panic, it’s a bubble with billions being invested in for no return, and ai chows down on those billions well, thus giant, unexplainable, strikingly accurate ai, that investors want put in every facet of your life. and no one! likes it!!
There’s no real problem here because “AI” doesn’t exist. A transcript program is certainly not “intelligent” or even “artificial” in any meaningful sense.
So, if you want to use an automated transcription program, I don’t see why not. Just check that it’s fairly accurate and not somehow nefarious.
Not sure you and the OP is on the same page? Or maybe I’m not.
OP is talking about alternative text for images, for people who can’t see. The alternative text is a description of the image. I’m not sure how you could achieve automated alternative text without AI?
If you are talking about OCR, even that is AI powered.
Eh? There’s plenty of non-“AI”-powered OCR, isn’t there? Like, that’s been a thing since long before “AI” slop generators.
(Like, mayyyybe there’s some kind of machine learning component, but even IF there is, surely you don’t have to run it through a slop generator to get a transcription?)
Almost all OCR tools use machine learning AFAIK, the commonly used Tesseract OCR software also uses a neural network.
It certainly isn’t AGI, but AI just means machine learning nowadays.
If you can run it your computer for a job that you would do anyway, I don’t see why not
A lot artists doesn’t want that their art is used on ai. You can’t prevent that if you let ai summarize your images. So don’t use ai for that
I was actually thinking of using a self-hosted LLM for these tasks. I wanna dig again into it and I got access to computers on the cheap
LLMs can’t see. are you talking about one with a vision thingamabob bolted on? you could just use ocr
Those are different mechanisms. Object recognition doesn’t mean the AI is now trained on the image and can reproduce it (which is btw why AI can still “visually” recognise what’s in an image that has been nightshaded/glazed).
This is true but it’s also important to remember that if you use an AI model hosted by the same party that trains it it’s likely that they will pass any data you input to the training stage. Unless you have an enterprise contract regulating training use.
OP mentioned he will use a self-hosted LLM though and in that case it’s no risk of the data being used for training.
I mean, if you put any image online that hasn’t been protected/poisoned in some way, you have to (unfortunately) assume it’s in some AI’s training data anyway. If the tradeoff for a useful description (! See my other comments about the lack of usefulness) is that an image is also fed into one more training corpus, that would be worth a thought, imho. If the image is protected/poisoned, I’d indeed encourage this whole hypothetical process, just to further sabotage the data.
Personally “AI” is a slur for profit-driven generative bs. The concept it’s based on is great. I love pattern recognition and all the possible usecases for Machine Learning when it comes to science, material research, …
tl;dr: Go for it.
If you can get an AI to produce an actually useful description, that would be extremely interesting. However, AIs don’t know what’s important about an image and will fill up the description with useless information, effectively spam for the person that needs a description.
Write just a sentence, describe the thing that is important, while keeping in mind why you’re even posting the image, and it’s going to take less time than asking the AI.
For those that need it, any description is better than none.
True and one sentence written by a human who understands the image is better than twenty sentences by a word prediction machine.
No matter how good human written descriptions are, people just won’t do them. So having a automated system is much more preferable.
I know what you’re saying but I truly think for most people it’s simply that they’re overthinking it. They think every single thing needs to be in the description, with references explained and sourced and whatnot. That does sound exhausting. And I have written a handful of descriptions like that for pictures where I thought the details were interesting enough to justify the effort. But really, a simple “The thirteenth Doctor and Rose Tyler embracing and deeply kissing” is already very sufficient in most cases (add “standing on an asteroid in front of a field of glittering stars - digital colour painting” if you have the spoons). So imho it’s better to educate them and encourage short, concise descriptions than to give in to the slop.
people do them lots and lots on parts of the fediverse that are not lemmy! in fact, i think the only reason no lemmers do it is because the ui sucks (the alt text box in a post pops up in a completely unrelated section when you add an image!! alt text must be attached to images)
You do realize that would lead to people (humans) doing the descriptions even less?
I would argue that it might even increase the number of descriptions if they’re auto generated. People would find it easier to fix small issues than write a whole one from scratch.
It would increase the number of bad descriptions and desincentivize people to add good descriptions or (depending on the interface/permissions; you are assuming I could just manually go and fix someone else’s alt-info in their image) submit fixes and corrections. And it would kill the environment even more anyway.
Sure. I don’t care enough to argue. I’m not going to be the one who implements this system anyway, lol.
Yeah, apart from the fact that I imagine that people who need alt text don’t appreciate LLM output. It‘s very boring. It’s either extremely technical and ice-cold or so cringe that you have to stop reading. Just what I think.
At least for me, if I realize that I’m reading an AI blog article or AI generated text in some other form, I don’t read it.
So you posted this from mastodon? Is @Lumidaub your tag there?
“@Lumidaub” is a reference to me. The system added that because they were, technically, replying to my comment here.
Gotcha, these look so full of links on my client
Yep, same, it’s a bit of a weakness of the Fediverse imho.
personally, this is the kind of laser focused tooling its good for. LLMs are going to be critical to assisting the disabled in many contexts.
Yeah, you can check and fix it, the consumer can’t
I think that technology can really help us here. OCR on images is mostly solved. If you know what PaddleOCR can do, those people on Mastodon who are whining about others not including an image description for a screenshot seem really annoying. It is possible to do this directly on your computer without any costs, without the need for beefy hardware. So no need to try to force everyone else to include transcriptions for screenshot, no need to attack other people, just do it yourself and enjoy the text on the screenshot. Technology can really help us here.
This also does kind of apply to AI image descriptions. Try it and put an image into Gemini and ask it to describe it. You will be surprised. AI can totally give you a workable description of an image. The problem here is that those AI tools can get quite expensive when you are using them a lot and that many disabled people do not have much money. So in my opinion it totally is ok to include AI image descriptions.
I think that there are too many people in the fediverse who do not know the current state of the technology and hate AI for maybe the right reasons, but who are missing out how it could help them.
wouldn’t using standard ocr be easier?
Using AI for
no
I find it tiring
The problem with disabled people isn’t the disability, it’s the behaviour of non-disabled people putting them under, willingly or not. You being tired of that ir actively putting them under. Yes, it’s tiring to take care of people, it’s work. There’s no goind around that. Treating people as equals requires taking care of them, and until you take that as normal (just like brushing your teeth or doind the laundry or sweeping the floor at your place is work, but you still do it) you will be belittling them.
The change needs to happen on your side, on your conception of humanity and society. AI is not going to help you
I read this disgraceful comment yesterday, and I’ve dug through my history to reply to it today.
@rako, this unacceptable. Let’s remove the mention of AI to see if you can get some perspective… Imagine this exchange:
P1: I’ve been cooking for the homeless but it’s taking up a lot of my time and energy. Is it ok to use shop-bought meals?
P2: You being weary of cooking is belittling the homeless! People like you are what’s wrong with society.
I hope you can agree that this is unfair, and unhinged. It’s also not mischaracterising what you wrote.
@Gonzako you don’t seem to have minded rako trying to shame you, but they were way out of line.
I’m sorry but you are just showing you don’t know what AI is about. AI isn’t a shop-bought meal. It’s paying a white supremacist who pinky-promises you he’ll feed people you just have to give him money. The white supremacist chooses what he wants to do with the money: maybe he’ll feed people because they’re white, maybe he’ll beat people because they’re black, but one thing is for sure: he will always work for his own benefit. Not for others, not for you, and certainly not for disabled people.
The correct comparison with AI is not, as many people say, a neutral tool. AI is a political project aiming at domination of a large part of the population. The apt comparison is slavery. Yes, it can be very useful ! It’s free workforce, you don’t need to argue with it, concede anything, and things just get done. Slavery is fine if you’re part of the dominating part of the population, just like AI is fine if you’re part of the dominating part of population. If you’re on the other side you will always be exploited, dehumanized, tortured (yes, subjecting people to constan horrors in the name of “training” is torture)
Let’s redo your analogy now:
I’ve been cooking for the homeless but I’m getting tired. Is it ok to ask slaves to cook meals for me so I can give the meals to homeless ?
Slavery, and AI, isn’t going to help the homeless or the disabled. Destroying the earth, appropriating others’ art and work and knowledge for personal profit is not helping, it’s actively hurting.
What is at stake here, really, is your own appreciation of the goods vs the bads of AI. If the literal anti-democratic project is acceptable because it makes you feel like a good person (“I’m helping people !”) then there is a big work to be done to unravel that. When your personal opinion of yourself is more important than the actual good you might do, something is wrong.
Yeah, but you can’t preemptively take care of everyone. For example, satisfactorys arachnophobia mode wouldnt exist if it wasnt for the fact that one of the devs couldn’t work on it otherwise.
Time and effort are a limited resource.
There is a huge difference between not taking care because it’s not important to you, and not taking care because you can’t. It’s a cop out to mix up both.
It’s completely ok to acknowledge that you can’t do it, and to ask around for others to relay you. That’s society at work doing good things for all of us, and that’s how we get out of all this mess. It’s perfectly fine !
*yea or nay
By transcribing, do you mean describing what is in a picture, or transcribing text in a picture?
For the former, I can’t really imagine an image you couldn’t describe for accessibility within a sentence, and for the latter, OCR could do the job equally well.
I’m not saying this to just push the view that neural networks are no good for anything btw. For translation, for example, or text to speech/speech to text, I genuinely think they’re a revelation, and they need very little compute to perform those functions.
!!!
In my opinion, no. It has to be heavily curated. You’re not saving yourself a lot of work if you have to read it word by word (and probably correct stuff) anyway.
I think just one very short sentence describing what’s on there (it doesn’t have to be detailed) is a lot better than whatever an LLM will give you.
It depends a lot on the image. Multi panel comics have pretty long alt texts and AI can make it faster to reproduce the text in tge image.
and AI can make it faster to reproduce the text in tge image
That was solved decades ago without AI. It’s called OCR.
ackshyually ai is a broad term that applied to ocr when it was first made, but nobody uses it that way anymore, they refer to machine learning. but wait! machine learning is used for ocr!!
But then you’re primarily extracting text, which you don’t need LLMs for. OCR tools will do the job much cheaper and more effective.
i used tesseract and then proofread it for text images(???????)
