this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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If you can get an AI to produce an actually useful description, that would be extremely interesting. However, AIs don't know what's important about an image and will fill up the description with useless information, effectively spam for the person that needs a description.
Write just a sentence, describe the thing that is important, while keeping in mind why you're even posting the image, and it's going to take less time than asking the AI.
@Lumidaub
Writing a short description will be faster and more accurate.
It will tale less time than checking and correcting the output of #ai.
@Gonzako
So you posted this from mastodon? Is @Lumidaub your tag there?
"@Lumidaub" is a reference to me. The system added that because they were, technically, replying to my comment here.
Gotcha, these look so full of links on my client
Yep, same, it's a bit of a weakness of the Fediverse imho.
For those that need it, any description is better than none.
True and one sentence written by a human who understands the image is better than twenty sentences by a word prediction machine.
No matter how good human written descriptions are, people just won't do them. So having a automated system is much more preferable.
people do them lots and lots on parts of the fediverse that are not lemmy! in fact, i think the only reason no lemmers do it is because the ui sucks (the alt text box in a post pops up in a completely unrelated section when you add an image!! alt text must be attached to images)
I know what you're saying but I truly think for most people it's simply that they're overthinking it. They think every single thing needs to be in the description, with references explained and sourced and whatnot. That does sound exhausting. And I have written a handful of descriptions like that for pictures where I thought the details were interesting enough to justify the effort. But really, a simple "The thirteenth Doctor and Rose Tyler embracing and deeply kissing" is already very sufficient in most cases (add "standing on an asteroid in front of a field of glittering stars - digital colour painting" if you have the spoons). So imho it's better to educate them and encourage short, concise descriptions than to give in to the slop.
You do realize that would lead to people (humans) doing the descriptions even less?
I would argue that it might even increase the number of descriptions if they're auto generated. People would find it easier to fix small issues than write a whole one from scratch.
It would increase the number of bad descriptions and desincentivize people to add good descriptions or (depending on the interface/permissions; you are assuming I could just manually go and fix someone else's alt-info in their image) submit fixes and corrections. And it would kill the environment even more anyway.
Sure. I don't care enough to argue. I'm not going to be the one who implements this system anyway, lol.
Yeah, apart from the fact that I imagine that people who need alt text don’t appreciate LLM output. It‘s very boring. It’s either extremely technical and ice-cold or so cringe that you have to stop reading. Just what I think.
At least for me, if I realize that I’m reading an AI blog article or AI generated text in some other form, I don’t read it.