Tagged “AI”

A thought-provoking look at how LLMs might lower the burden of writing useful alt text for images, and – given the right prompts – produce better results than humans doing it manually.

It’s far more descriptive than what I would have written without it.

Jared goes on to argue that the benefits really multiply when working at scale. This part made me think of the content team at my work who maintain a customer-facing knowledge base and need to write alt text for hundreds of screenshots.

A huge time-saver is if you’re working with a large set of images. You can write the prompt only once and then say you want the same applied to each image you upload.

I didn’t have the appetite for Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel during the pandemic. I started it, but as the underlying sense of melancholy and “something bad around the corner” began to set in – just like it did in Never let me go – I realised I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. Cut to 2025 and it was time to give it another go.

I’d read before that Ishiguro is primarily interested in exploring what it is to be human, and uses science and technology elements as a device to support that. In Never let me go the device was cloning. In this book, the narrator is an “artificial friend” named Klara who is an AI-powered, empathetic android, and Ishiguro uses Klara’s unique perspective to shine a light on human behaviour and motivations.

I won’t attempt to properly review the book when others have done it much better. I’ll just say I really enjoyed it and recommend it.

Here are a few scrappy notes about themes I found interesting and jotted down.

• Scientific and technological advancements that present moral questions
• the idea of genetic editing (modification, I guess) to gain advantage, but with risks and side-effects. The gamble this represents.
• human loneliness
• blind faith/religion (which even Klara, as a rational machine, learned)
• Klara’s capacity for innocence, morality, contentment in a way that the humans seemed incapable of
• The idea that we can’t create identical clones of people because it’s not just their makeup that makes them unique; there’s also how others love and perceive them (which can’t be copied)
• the potential dark side-effects of our societal choices and technological advances: environment collapse and pollution; societal divisions (the father Paul’s armed community)

Ethan assembles numerous technology articles, some of which are enthusiastic about generative AI and LLMs while others highlight political, social and health impacts and risks.