4w ago

Accessibility is the only moral use that Generative AI can have nowadays

I don't particularly use generative IAs that create Alt Text from images, but I've seen a lot of people who do use them and I think that's the only use of AI from which I can't draw anything negative.

The fact is that there are many people who do not know how to make a good Alt Text, and therefore either do not put them or put one that is only the word "photo/image", which is much worse.

I think if AI had started there, as a tool to help accessibility, it wouldn't have the stigma it has today.

But of course, there are not enough blind people in the world from whom to get absurdly, ridiculously, vulgarly obscene amounts of profit...

28 comments

(edit: I kind of regret posting this image for reasons described below, but I'll leave it up for context.)
- Disabled people are not going to all agree on everything, especially when they are pretty diverse. Some will like gen ai, and some will not.
  
  It depends on what the disability is if it could help or not.
- I'm glad Mary speaks for all disabled people and we can finally put this topic to rest.
  
  Mary doesn't get an opinion because it doesn't represent 100% of people like her!
- I think that in this context it does not apply because the person in the image is talking about people who use accessibility as an excuse to keep asking ChatGPT to do their homework, and I in particular refer to the legitimate use of AI solely and exclusively to facilitate accessibility. I could give as an example the Bots on Mastodon that, if you follow them, when you upload an image without Alt Text, they respond to the Toot with a detailed description of the image.
  
  Where is the context about using AI to do their homework?
- Yeah, and all it requires is for poorly paid workers in Kenya to be tortured and forced to watch CSAM all day.
Generative AI can have a lot of great uses to detect and prevent unethical content online. Particularly CSAM. Some forms of it are already used to protect some of your favourite lemmy instances.
- That's not really generative AI
  
  Machine vision is very similar tech
This is patently incorrect. Using it to identify and remove NSFL content, which would otherwise require humans to be psychologically tortured in order to review, is also an ethical use-case.
- I didn't know that was a thing! Thanks for inform me!
If you're only looking at the tools everybody can get a hold of, I agree. I think if you look a bit further, you will find medical diagnostics that can hopefully top human detection scores and that's worth pursuing as well.
I don't see any good reason why the general public needs to have access to most of the models today. Most people just play around with it - and I don't see the value there. When we get the final tally, we will have made the climate crisis worse and caused droughts with all the thirsty data center consumption. All so Alexa can remember what you said two queries ago and you can animate your childhood teddy in the Ghibli style.
Well you just gonna use it but maybe not tell people who you want upvotes from about it or something, it’s not a huge problem
The problem isn’t “is it moral” the problem is “is it good?” And it just isn’t that good.
I have like 10 game ideas that I want to play myself, waiting for when it finally gets good.
For example a Silo simulation game like dwarf fortress adventure mode story generator with 1000 residents of a silo all interacting with each other and causing periodic events like rebellions and such. Another one is Star Wars galaxy 2D simulation with all the trading and ships and sort of sid meyers pirates feel. Basically once there is a franchise I like I want to create a game about it, sandbox style and interact with the world within
I don’t really have time or patience to dig over through quirks of unity ecs dots though. Not yet anyway. Maybe it is even more of ecs problem in itself because it is such a construction site with tons of depreciated and in-2-months “outdated” features. It needs to be finished by unity first I guess
It's been helpful in summarizing YouTube transcripts for the video alt text
- Do you check it every single time to make sure it is accurate?
  
  I eyeball it. A few times I was surprised and had to double check the video and found a few segments sponsorblock had skipped.

28 comments