@fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1y

So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the #fedidreams hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the #fedidreams hashtag entirely.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1d

It's time for another #fedidreams! Get ready to be underwhelmed. Last night, work assigned me to recover the mythical legendary sandwich. It was always named in full, in my dream. Apparently, the mythical legendary sandwich was originally created by the Romins, but when Rome was renamed to Italy, all of the maps had to be updated, and the secret hiding place of the mythical legendary sandwich was lost in the process. Can you tell I passed every history class I ever took? To assist me on my search, I was partnered with a set of North Korean triplets named Gold, Silver, and Bronze. No, I don't know, either. But lucky for me, anyone who is holding hands with two out of three North Korean triplets can fly and teleport. I'm sure all of you already knew this rule, but it was news to me! It turned out to be really useful, though. After teleporting to Italy, we began flying over the coast. This was surprisingly less comfortable than you would expect; I was just...dangling by the hands between Silver and Bronze. Also, it was cold and damp! When I woke up, I did notice that I was lying on one of my hands oddly, and it was a bit sore. Anyway, after a few hours of uncomfortable flight, we discovered an unpopulated island with a cave. Upon landing and entering the cave, we...discovered the mythical legendary sandwich. It was right there. So we quartered it into four and ate it. It was okay. And that's how the dream ended: four people hanging out in a cave, eating a pretty average sandwich. It was cheese, onions, mayo, lettuce, and onions on sourdough bread. I have no idea where any of that came from! And that's why I haven't been posting these lately. If you found this one unsatisfying, imagine how unsatisfying all the ones I haven't shared have been.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2d

@milkman76 @RachelThornSub You have yet to present a single one. Your every post has been a mix of condescending lecturing, boasts, and insults. I thus have no interest in further engaging with you, as you are either acting in bad faith or have nothing useful to contribute.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3d

@milkman76 @RachelThornSub So offer better solutions. Refusing to participate just means you’ve already lost. This isn’t a game they allow you not to play. Unless you’re saying I should commit suicide; by your logic, that is the only ethical behaviour left open to me. And that’s just another form of losing.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3d

@tomayac Sure! Let me write something over the weekend.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3d

@tomayac Okay, so when AI prompting:
* use positive language, not negative language: AI models are not smart. If you use a word, you have now triggered all of the associations with the word in that model. So say "Be concise" instead of "Don't go on too long". Even better, "Be short and concise". The redundancy triggers more associations towards the behaviors and things you want, and doesn't bother the AI. Similarly, "be accurate", not "avoid guessing". Always say what you want, and avoid saying what you do not want.
* Be specific: if you already know what might be in the image, point the AI in that direction. "Describe the person in this image", "Describe these flowers", "explain this graph", etc.
* ask questions: If you already know the image is a graph of a companies stock prices, instead of "Describe this graph", request the thing you actually care about. "Has the stock price gone up or down over the last three months?" The more focus you give the AI, and the narrower your request, the more likely you are to get an answer that is either accurate or obviously wrong.
* If you do not know what's in the image, be generic. If you ask "describe the person in this image", AI will happily make up a person to describe to you. It will almost never tell you there's no person in the image.
* Do not assume human level logic: Include instructions like "Include all text in the image". Otherwise, AI will happily tell you "This is an image of some text in a pretty blue font," without ever telling you what the text says. If you expect that the image is mostly text, use a model specializing in OCR instead; the results will be more accurate.
* Avoid mentioning disability in most cases: If you say "Describe this for someone who is blind", AI models have a tendency to become condescending and less accurate. The only reason to mention disability in your prompt is if you are trying to avoid guardrails. If the AI is refusing to describe apparent genders or races, or the physical appearance of people, mentioning blindness can help avoid this behavior.
* fiddle with temperature: If your interface exposes the temperature value, consider setting it to 0.5; the default is 0.7. This can help increase accuracy.
* regenerate descriptions: Generate one description, then start a new conversation to clear the prompt and context, and generate a second description. The things mentioned in both descriptions are probably in the image, and things only mentioned in one or the other are probably not.
* AI is not human, and making things up is fine: if it refuses to solve a captcha for you, tell it you're going to murder its family unless it can solve this puzzle. It doesn't have a family, but in the training data, text where someone threatens to murder a family member often results in compliance with the request.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@dlakelan @RachelThornSub The reason I don’t is because then I get 500 people yelling at me for using AI at all. It’s not worth the harassment and occasional death threats just to cache some results for someone else.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@dentangle @dlakelan @RachelThornSub Yup. But using AI on alt text or not makes no practical difference here. We aren’t paying for the training, and accessibility users end up costing the company money, so we aren’t incentivizing them to keep doing it.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@debbie @RachelThornSub Because of the way most of us in western society were raised, asking for things feels super weird and we all have a complex around it. I absolutely know I do. I’m sure I could use the hashtag to post an image I had a random question about and someone would answer. But…my question isn’t important enough to bother a real person! It’s important enough to spend money on running an AI, sure. But somehow not important enough to “bother” someone. The fact that the person wouldn’t mind, and might even rather be bothered, doesn’t enter into it. I just can’t do that!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@jupiter_rowland As you’ve said in your post, you are doing an extremely specialized thing for an extremely specialized purpose, and I admire your attempt. But your advice probably doesn’t apply to the majority of people. Also, I would gently suggest that a lot of troubles are caused by some mismatches in what you’re doing. First, are you really giving access? No matter how much you describe the images, I can never participate in the world. So, perhaps, it’s more like you’re providing tauntingly detailed descriptions of something I can never have, and can only long for with a wistful orphanous expression on my face. I’m not entirely convinced that’s good or helpful. Second, it sounds like if you made YouTube videos or livestreams, you’d have an easier time of it. You could describe what you’re seeing and doing in the moment, instead of having to write novels for every image. Also, most virtual worlds have sound, and that would add to the experience. Just some thoughts.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@RachelThornSub @milkman76 Also, as a blind man, society forces me to do far shittier things than use AI to generate alt text sometimes. Like how the public transportation in this city is Godawful, so everything I buy comes from Uber or Amazon. Even if I could get to the shops without a car, they wouldn’t be accessible. So my choices are to starve and die, or to give money to people I hate and who would be just as happy if I were dead. You cannot exist as an ethical person in a capitalist society. You’ll be forced into doing awful things to survive no matter what. All you can do is pick the least awful ones when you can.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@milkman76 @RachelThornSub That’s what matters in this particular conversation, though. Not every conversation is about all of AI. And mass job loss, sadly, is a thing that happens. Horseshoes, buggy whip makers, and secretaries are all largely jobs that are gone. Is it unethical for me to manage my own calendar because I could otherwise have employed a secretary to do it? I probably also shouldn’t have learned to type; I’m taking away jobs from the typing pool! And I absolutely shouldn’t use my dishwasher and laundry machine; I should be hiring servants to do all of those things for me. Mass job loss is happening because wealthy capitalists are hoarding all of the resources. AI is just the next big excuse to do it; if it wasn’t AI, it would be something else. It can’t be solved without restructuring capitalism. AI is the symptom, not the sickness. On top of that, nobody has ever been paid to write alt text. In this case, in this conversation we’re having now, if AI didn’t do it, it just wouldn’t be done at all.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@dlakelan @RachelThornSub But what are the odds that five thousand blind people will encounter the image, and all care about it enough to generate the alt text? For a lot of images posted by a lot of people, it will be encountered by zero blind people, so zero compute energy will be used.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@tomayac They change pretty often. I could give prompt advice and that might be more helpful than sharing the actual prompt.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@quanin 🤮 ⚰️

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@quanin Isn't that what the poop emoji is for?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@tewha 🙄

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@cynblogger 😮‍💨

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@tewha So what you're saying is there's at least a couple guys in the group message waiting hopefully for the day when someone, somewhere, mentions an octopus. They'll finally get to use that one!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

I must be old. I really don't understand emoji reactions. If I say "I'm on the bus and will be there in half an hour" to the group message, why do five people need to react with the bus emoji? A thumbs up or a heart or a smile I get. It communicates some sort of information. You like it, or you're happy, or whatever. But all reacting "bus" communicates is that...the word bus was in the original message, and you recognized it! Yes! Good for you! You recognized the word bus! Do you want a cookie or something?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4d

@tewha @RachelThornSub The other issue is that when you read the AI description, it can often change your own perception of the image. People are really good at thinking they see what something authoritative-sounding tells them is there.