The headline is clearly meant to be sarcastic but the actual body of the text seems to indicate that AI back in 2023 was going pretty great for the blind - it mostly reports on others who are enthusiastic adopters of it, despite the author's own misgivings.

▲ PhantomHour 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's a big difference in precisely how the technology is applied.

Transformer models making screen readers better is cool. Companies deciding to fire their human voice actors and replacing all audiobooks with slop is decidedly not cool.

You can really see this happening in translation right now. Companies left and right are firing human translators and replacing their work with slop, and it's a huge step down in quality because AI simply cannot do the previous level of quality. (Mr Chad Gippity isn't going to maintain puns or add notes for references that the new audience won't catch.)

And that's in a market where there is commercial pressure to have quality work. Sloppy AI translations are already hurting sales.

In accessibility, it's a legal checkbox. Companies broadly do not care. It's already nearly impossible to get people to do things like use proper aria metadata. "We're a startup, we gotta go fast, ain't got no time for that".

AI is already being used to provide a legally-sufficient but practically garbage level of accessibility. This is bad.

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conradev 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Firing voice actors is not great. Replacing human-narrated audio with AI narrated audio is not great.

But the coverage of audiobooks is… also not great? Of the books I've purchased recently, maybe 30% or less have audiobooks? What if I want to listen to an obscure book? Should I be paying a human narrator to narrate my personal library?

The copyright holders are incentivized to make money. It does not make financial sense to pay humans to narrate their entire catalog. As long as they're the only ones allowed to distribute derivative works, we're kind of in a pickle.

	▲	PhantomHour 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> What if I want to listen to an obscure book? Should I be paying a human narrator to narrate my personal library? You weren't doing that before AI either, were you? The practical answer has already been "you pipe an ebook through a narrator/speech synthesizer program". > The copyright holders are incentivized to make money. Regulations exist. It'd be rather trivial to pass a law mandating every ebook sold to be useable with screen readers. There's already laws for websites, albeit a bit poorly enforced.

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cpfohl 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Boy my experience with small chunks of translation between languages I know well is not the same at all. When prompted properly the translation quality is unbelievable and can absolutely catch nuances, puns, and add footnotes.

That said, I use it with pretty direct prompting, and I strongly prefer the "AI Partners with a Human" model.

	▲	PhantomHour 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sorry but I simply do not believe you that it does handle things like puns and things requiring footnotes, my experience is that LLMs are miserable at this even when directly "instructed" to. But for what it concerns my previous comment: It doesn't really matter what the "state of the art" AI is because companies simply do not use that. They just pipe it through the easiest & cheapest models, human review (that does not actually get the time to do meaningful review) optional.

▲ Wowfunhappy 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I did not interpret the headline as sarcastic.

▲ simonw 6 days ago | parent [-]

The actual headline is:

  AI is going great for the blind.

That . (not present in the Hacker News posting) made me think it was sarcastic, combined with the author's clear dislike of generative AI.

	▲	lxgr 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It also pattern matches to "Web3 is going just great", a popular crypto-skeptic blog – not sure if that's intentional. There seems to be a sizable crowd of cryptocurrency hype critics that have pivoted to criticizing the AI hype (claiming that the hype itself is also largely caused by the same actors, and that accordingly neither crypto nor AI have much object-level merit to them) – ironically and sadly in a quite group-think-heavy way, considering how many valid points of criticism there are to be made of both.
	▲	ljlolel 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I posted it with the period