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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wouldn’t using standard ocr be easier?
Yeah, you can check and fix it, the consumer can’t
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.
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.
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.
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.
and AI can make it faster to reproduce the text in tge image
That was solved decades ago without AI. It’s called OCR.
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.
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.
AI is great for this. We shouldn’t put people with disabilities at a disadvantage because of the anti-AI hysteria.
If you can run it your computer for a job that you would do anyway, I don’t see why not
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 !
