Kind: Replies

Essentially they scrape it from whoever's not blocking their bots. It then becomes part of the model used to train the thing to generate a likely sounding response, or, in this case, images that are likely to meet the criteria specified by the prompt given.

I get what you're saying. But given the way LLMs obtain their data, I'm not sure educating on the beneficial use cases is adequate.

@Pawpower Yeah we can do that. Actually that sounds like a great idea.

@ner Yes. Yes they do. And I haven't even brought in the "I've had a few" factor lol.

OK we're firing the rest of the week.

I should have enclosed that in a sarc tag. I should go edit the post.

@ner Yes I am speaking from experience.

@mcourcel @wiljames @Bruce_Toews OK clearly you do not understand what the meaning of "hack" is and you've already convinced yourself that the context of an image doesn't really matter so let's just agree to discontinue this conversation.

The way this apartment is laid out, tripping and running into a wall is a somewhat regular occurrence.

@mcourcel @wiljames @Bruce_Toews And saying "But AI!" to all of this doesn't address the actual problems. It's just another hack that will eventually become outdated like all the others.

@mcourcel @wiljames @Bruce_Toews Just to add to this since it went in the predictable direction, alt text is how you make media accessible on the web for people who can't consume it in the typical way, (hence alternative), and access is quite literally a civil right in the US and Canada, and a human right everywhere else, so people who need accessibility are quite literally entitled. There's plenty out there if anyone wants to look it up. That said, you get a lot more done if you are polite when asking to the extent that you can be than you do by shouting at people. It's also entirely understandable that people would become frustrated over this, since Mastodon has become a culture heavy on funny memes as images and screenshots of important info, and accessibility has degraded quite a bit after the 2022 Twitter migration.

@philliesfan4 Yeah what James said.

I'd ask who you're referring to, but honestly this could have so many referants at this point it's ridiculous.

Yeah. And huge chunks of the people who will be devoutly reciting the Niemöller poem are the same people who have spent the last year screaming "Nazi!" and "Hitler!" and "Go back to Europe!" at every Jew they can't tokenize as often as they can. I'd say irony is dead but that just doesn't seem like enough.

Or burgers. This would go great on burgers.

Mmmm chicken.

What are you putting this on?

I think Ninite still has it.

@mcourcel @Bruce_Toews I also understand though that people who do actually need it get frustrated and how that frustration can get out.

@mcourcel @Bruce_Toews That's a fine method, until you don't have a working internet connection. As useful as LLMs can be, they're not a substitute for humans describing their own images when they can because they can add the context LLMs lack. But people who need alt text being combative about it is a lot less productive than working with people to get them to add alt text.