AI is going great for the blind (2023)

Summary

As I was looking at the amount of times platforms died on the web and I began thinking about the slow death of AI enthusiasm and what that will do to the Blind community. It really is a bizarre feeling when you’re the only skeptic of a thing within your own community. My first post about AI has gained some attention, as well as the follow up post about this topic. AI is taking the blind community by storm. Be my Eyes has added it into their product to describe pictures, Let’s not mention the fact the particular large language model, LLM called Chat GPT they chose, was never the right kind of machine learning for the task of describing images. A different kind of machine learning would have been better. Blind podcasters are praising LLMs and saying they’re more accurate than human descriptions, and, well, blind voiceover artists are more than willing to give places like ElevenLabs their voices so they can, well, I don’t even know yet. I guess attempt to make audiobooks. I’m of two minds about this whole thing. While the stuff LLMs is giving us is incorrect information, it’s still information that the sighted world won’t or refuses to give us. While I absolutely hate the hype and even AI nonsense in general, and don’t use any LLM on any of my content, blind and visually impaired people can become audio book narrators if their Braille skills aren’t that great with ElevenLabs. Even though I’ll never hire a blind narrator that uses ElevenLabs to generate an audio book, am I practicing discrimination by doing this? Someone will say yes. I don’t know what will come of this wave in LLMs and dependance on AI, but I predict that once the hype dies down, well, blind and even legally blind people are probably going to be advocating for more accessibility measures but in a different way. AI accessibility will have its own challenges. In fact, we’re already witnessing instances of AI developers forgetting disabled people exist so I fully predict that blind people will be advocati...