Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by unix_fan 995 days ago
As a user, my biggest concern is that it won’t describe certain content, such as adult content or something that might be considered offensive.. I feel like I should be able full control over the output.

On the other hand, I’d like to be able to test its ability to describe graphics to me. If it’s able to turn graphics into an accessible table, I can browse with my screen reader that would be revolutionary.

2 comments

Reminds me of when I was young little teenage shithead with shithead friends who discovered the text-to-talk support provided for deaf landline telephone use. You would go to a website and enter a number you would like to call. Then a human operator would read out what you typed to the person you called.

As we quickly learned, the operator would say anything. Anything. So for a few days we would call each other with the operator and never were able to find the limit. I have great respect now, those operators were inhumanly stone faced, and respect that the system was perfectly transparent. Nothing typed was hidden or obfuscated.

There was a programme the other day about this on BBC Radio 4. Unless they’ve resolved the problem already, it will refuse to describe any scene with faces in it, for privacy reasons. Which obviously rules out a lot of useful use-cases. You’re in a cafe wondering what’s going on, Be My AI can’t help if there’s a face. I think it was related to some EU legislation which Be My Eyes are now at least trying to change for this use-case. I wish them the best of luck.
Update: Just tried this again, and it looks like they've loosened the restrictions. It will now describe people again. Yay! It just won't try to identify who someone is.

Original comment: Yeah, this wasn't always the case, until recently. People were using it to describe their kids, spouses, etc. Pissed a lot of folks off when they disabled it. I never even thought of using it for that, so now that I realize I could have, it kinda' pisses me off as well. Honestly, I never cared too much what they looked like, but it would have been interesting to hear the ChatGPT viewpoint. :)

But definitely not something I could have asked a fellow human about without it seeming really weird, and being confident I wouldn't get a biased answer. Though it's probably unrealistic to expect that the AI wouldn't also give a biased answer.