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.

I'd ask someone who needs these transcriptions first. I tend more towards "Nay". I mean if they want AI transcriptions, I guess they could just run their own AI. And that way they get to choose between human and AI ones. I'm kind of against flooding the internet with AI content as long as the recipients can do it themselves.

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.

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.

Check your output as it may be less accurate than your effort.

AI is able to extensively describe a photo, like these published on !pics@lemmy.world , but fails at seeing, what part of it is actually important, or recognising a point of a meme. It will save you many keystrokes, but probably will still need to be manually corrected.

Imo it's a good use. But do make sure you read the outputs throughly. Even hand-made OCR tools can go crazy some times. Also if the AI can be fully offline / self-hosted, that's even better imo.

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.

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.

Do not.

Please just don't.

People (hi I'm people) need what the image IS, what's important about it, why you included it. Not just what some slop generator shat out about it.

Better to have nothing, which is at least honest, than to have something that PURPORTS to have meaning but then just, doesn't.

-- Frost

If you can run it your computer for a job that you would do anyway, I don't see why not

I'd say go ahead but make sure it produces accurate enough results and make sure to add something like [AI Transcribed] in front so people can take the potential for additional errors into consideration when reading it.

Also, if you're using an online service make sure you're using something that doesn't use it as training data. Many (probably almost all) artists / photographers won't appreciate that.

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

If I were blind I'd prefer it if the app just hid all image posts from me. The alt text, when it exists, is going to be trash most of the time anyway.

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.

Yeah, you can check and fix it, the consumer can’t

*yea or nay

wouldn't using standard ocr be easier?

You have a unique advantage in using AI for this over a vision impaired person. That being that if the generated text is wrong, you know and can correct it.

Nay

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 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.