[astrange]

> Using our web crawling strategy, we sourced pairs of images with corresponding alt-texts.

An issue for anti-AI people, as seen on Bluesky, is that they're often "insisting you write alt text for all images" people as well. But this is probably the main use for alt text at this point, so they're essentially doing annotation work for free.

[simonw]

I think it is entirely morally consistent to provide alt text for accessibility even if you personally dislike it being used to train AI models.

[astrange]

It's fine if you want to, but I think they should consider that basically nobody is reading it. If it was important for society, photo apps would prompt you to embed it in the image like EXIF.

Computer vision is getting good enough to generate it; it has to be, because real-world objects don't have alt text.

[simonw]

I actually use Claude to generate the first draft of most of my alt text, but I still do a manual review of it because LLMs usually don't have enough contents to fully understand the message I'm trying to convey with an image: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/accessibility-and-gen-a...

[simonw]

Context not content.

[lxgr]

Why would photo apps do what's "important for society"?

Annotating photos takes time/effort, and I could totally imagine photo apps being resistant to prompting their users for that, some of which would undoubtedly find it annoying, and many more confusing.

Yet I don't think that one can conclude from that that annotations aren't helpful/important to vision impaired users (at least until very recently, i.e. before the widespread availability of high quality automatic image annotations).

In other words, the primary user base of photo editors isn't the set of people that would most benefit from it, which is probably why we started seeing "alt text nudging" first appear on social media, which has both producer and consumer in mind (at least more than photo editors).

[astrange]

> Why would photo apps do what's "important for society"?

One would hope they're responsive to user demands. I should say Lightroom does have an alt text field, but like phone camera apps don't.

Apple is genuinely obsessed with accessibility (but bad at social media) and I think has never once advocated for people to describe their photos to each other.

[barbazoo]

> An issue for anti-AI people, as seen on Bluesky, is that they're often "insisting you write alt text for all images" people as well. But this is probably the main use for alt text at this point, so they're essentially doing annotation work for free.

How did you come to the conclusion that those two groups overlap so significantly?

[Karrot_Kream]

This is a well known fact. A bunch of AI researchers tried to migrate to the platform from Twitter but got a ton of hate and death threats from other users so they went back. Bluesky has a pretty strong anti-AI bias and the community of folks talking about it despite that is very small.

[astrange]

Well that's easy, I read their posts where they say it.

[barbazoo]

So you found a couple people expressing this conflicting view and assumed it applies to a larger group? Doesn’t sound very reliable to me but I see this all the time and it makes sense if you look at it as a mechanism to explain the world .

[godelski]

  > this is probably the main use for alt text at this point

Alt text gives you 2k characters. All I gotta say is there's quite a bit of poisoned data