Month: 19 Tishri 5784 (October 2023)

@eric I think people treating Be My AI as the best thing since sliced bread is a huge mistake. Which is why I'm not using it. But I absolutely understand why this is happening. It's kind of like so-called drive-by lawsuits. It's completely counterproductive for blind people to lend their support/names to these efforts and it's also completely understandable when they do.

@eric Also though I think Eric's right when it comes to industry relying on AI to fix accessibility and how that's ableist.

@devinprater @eric It's a mistake because, at the end of the day, large language models like GPT are being used for a whole bunch of things they're not good at doing, and this is going to cause problems down the line, to say nothing of the problems already being caused. And no I'm not talking about sentience or anything science fiction like that.

@eric Damn I was trying not to bring overlays into this because that adds a whole separate level of fuckery.

@eric The only part that is possibly machine learning is the bit that connects to whatever image recognition thingy they're using to try to add alt text. And they're connecting to somebody's third-party API they don't have the resources to roll their own. All the rest, like the ARIA bits, is basically find/replace.

@devinprater @eric Yes if we had a specifically designed and trained model then the mistake part becomes a non-issue. As things stand now, this'll be great until things become inaccurat e enough so as to make the responses useless. See: model collapse.

@devinprater @eric Personally I'm in favor of giving the law more teeth and a proper enforcement mechanism until something like machine learning becomes reliable enough that it can be reasonably depended on. (see my discussion with Matt above). And I'm not blaming blind people for grasping at straws as it were. Just pointing out that in the end that's what this boils down to unless there is some sort of shift away from +

@devinprater @eric "AI is the new crypto" to something more serious.