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Mozilla Firefox new alt-text generator powered by "fully private on-device AI model" (hacks.mozilla.org)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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New accessibility feature coming to Firefox, an "AI powered" alt-text generator.

"Starting in Firefox 130, we will automatically generate an alt text and let the user validate it. So every time an image is added, we get an array of pixels we pass to the ML engine and a few seconds after, we get a string corresponding to a description of this image (see the code).

...

Our alt text generator is far from perfect, but we want to take an iterative approach and improve it in the open.

...

We are currently working on improving the image-to-text datasets and model with what we’ve described in this blog post..."

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[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The biggest problem with AI alt text is that it lacks the ability to determine and add in context, which is particularly important in social media image descriptions. But people adding useless alt text isn’t exactly a new thing either. If people treat this as a starting place for adding an alt text description and not a “click it and I don’t have to think about it” solution I’m massively in support of it.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 11 points 5 months ago

They just need to gamify it. Have a "Verified Accurate Alt-Text Submissions" leaderboard or something.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I would expect it'd be not too hard to expand the context fed into the AI from just the pixels to including adjacent text as well. Multimodal AIs can accept both kinds of input. Might as well start with the basics though.