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Facebook’s image outage reveals how the company’s AI tags your photos

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Re: Facebook’s image outage reveals how the company’s AI tags your photos

#61

Lots of comments about how this isn’t new, or how it’s related to accessibility. The article mentions all this. That’s not what the story is. It’s not a very deep story, but I don’t think it’s quite so trivial as is being suggested. The story is about this info being exposed to users just browsing the site, and the reaction that elicits. Someone seeing the tags inline in their feed by a glitch will tend to have a ver…

This is just the alt-text associated with the image and is there for accessibility purposes. That text is always part of the page even without the "glitch". This to me is a good use of AI as it provides a richer experience for those who can't otherwise view the images. I suppose it might make some people aware, who weren't otherwise, that their images are being processed for content. Much more interesting and readily…

I was unaware of that section of Facebook's settings, so thank you for the tip!

Looking through it, I am far less concerned with what Facebook knows about me, but I am not a daily user of the platform, and so it is probably understandable why their "Interests" as flagged are so generic (and also some are just wrong).

Re: Facebook’s image outage reveals how the company’s AI tags your photos

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an incredibly charitable interpretation of the word "reveal" in the headline. Every piece of information can be "revealed" to someone by that definition, it's happening all the time, and it wouldn't be a newsworthy event.

"Reveal" means to show something that was previously hidden from view - what has happened here is pretty much the textbook definition of the word.

is image alt text really that hidden, even if facebook doesnt show it on mouse hover? any screen reader would have used the descriptions, no?

Re: Facebook’s image outage reveals how the company’s AI tags your photos

#63

Why do they put this data in the alt-tag in human readable format? For what purpose or use? SEO on a personalized platform with very limited access by Googlebot? Just to show they can? It makes no sense to me.

The purpose of the alt tag is to provide a sufficient description of the image if it cannot be displayed, like it happened here. Everything went fine.
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