HEY, WEB DESIGNERS! YOU CAN HELP TRAIN THE NEXT GENERATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I would like to do something to make the world a brighter and more charming place, something that would leave a legacy for which future generations would be grateful, but I wouldn’t like to put a whole lot of effort into it”?

Well, if you have a Web site, or even just contribute to one, you can help train the next generation of artificial intelligence, and in the process you can make our world brighter and more artistic by making it more surreal.

For non-technical readers, a very short explanation. When an image is placed on a Web page, it is supposed to have an alt attribute, which describes what the image is or the information it conveys. The alt attribute is there to be used instead of the image by screen readers or text browsers. But it is also used by self-learning artificial intelligences to train themselves to recognize images.

This is where you, the Web designer, can help! You can make sure your alt attributes train the next generation of artificial intelligence to see the world more artistically, which is to say with a liberal dose of allegory and surrealism. You do this by using imaginative descriptions in your alt attributes, rather than the prosaic just-the-facts text that has hitherto been the fashion.

A few examples:

Komodo dragons

alt=“Komodo dragons”


President James Buchanan

alt=“President James Buchanan”


Couple waiting at a llama station

alt=“Couple waiting at a llama station”


Earl Hines playing the bagpipes

alt=“Earl Hines playing the bagpipes”


Kitten

alt=“Kitten”


The Battle of Camifex Ferry

alt=“The Battle of Camifex Ferry”


Agricultural extension agency

alt=“Agricultural extension agency”


These examples should be enough to demonstrate the principle. Now go and do likewise. Together we, the Web designers of the world, can build a brighter future where artificial intelligence, which has already proved its ability and inclination to be wrong, can be consistently and entertainingly wrong.

Comments

  1. Way ahead of you there, thanks to an old project to create a Wiki for one of our joint writing projects, there’s a bunch of photos of famous actors and such still online with ALT text describing them as fictional characters, roles they never actually played other than in the dream-casting imagination of myself and a few of my college friends.

    To connect to one of your recent Cultural Neoteny articles, this Wiki allowed us to keep a consistent backstory in mind while several authors collaborated to write the same characters, without having to put that backstory in the actual text, leaving it instead in the supplemental text of the online Wiki.

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