A guide to AI prompting from a blindness perspective
A common use case that comes up when dealing with AI is alt(ernative) text generation for images. This is a loaded topic, and people have even questioned whether AI generated alt text is any better than no alt text at all? As a completely blind computer geek, I’ll give my own opinion briefly here: assuming you’re not proofreading the AI alt text for accuracy, no alt text is better than AI generated alt text. Why? Because if alt text exists, a blind reader might not realize it’s been AI generated, and may trust it to be more accurate than it actually is. However, if no alt text exists, screen reader users have tools that we can use to generate it for ourselves. We know how trustworthy our own tools are, and have probably gone to a lot of time and effort changing prompts and settings to get them to be as accurate as possible for the current state of technology.
AI Roleplay is a Good Thing, Actually
Not a week goes by without some publication releasing a new article, video, or paper on the completely real and valid harms AI is doing to the mental health of a large segment of society. Sometimes it's a weird news or human interest fluff peace on someone getting married to Chat GPT. Sometimes it's a deep, hard-hitting look at AI psychosis. Sometimes it's just encouraging everyone to point and laugh at lonely people with mental struggles who have AI girlfriends, so the news publication can make money hand over fist from the clickbait while victimizing the people struggling.
The Problems and Successes of Fediverse Comments on my blog
I was inspired to write this by a number of recent articles around the blogosphere (is that still a word people use?) on using the fediverse (or atproto) as a way to get comments on a static blog. As someone who gets a lot of fediverse interaction, and has been doing this for a bit, the experience has been mixed.