What’s of interest? Writing alt text is a part of writing an article
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One of the mooted “positive” uses of generative AI is in automating the production of descriptive text, most commonly as alt text for images. The snappily named Image Accessibility Creator app will do just this when you feed it an image.
Apps such as Word and micro.blog already use generative AI to suggest alt text for images, presumably for users who see this as some sort of burden or nice to have. In Word, this often fails at a basic descriptive level, but my fear is that a service will become just about good enough to generate Large crowd of football fans with blue smoke in a stadium celebrating level text that its users accept thoughtlessly. It may be better than no alt text at all, but it’s not as meaningful as crafting a description.
There are occasions when auto-generating text is desirable. For example, if we’re looking to simply map words from one format to another, without conveying anything beyond the words themselves. The obvious uses are optical character recognition and audio and video transcription. But these are examples of recognition rather than “intelligence”, which you probably want to leave to people.
Where is it?: Writing alt text is a part of writing an article – This day’s portion
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