An AI use that will actually make you a better social media citizen

Issue #32. A useful tip

On today’s quest:

— AI can write pretty good alt text
— WSJ reporter used AI for “everything” for two weeks
— Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI

Tip: AI can write pretty good alt text

Alt text describes images for people who use screen readers, and including alt text is considered good practice on social media. I like to include it, but doing so can take some thought and a bit of typing. Facebook auto-generates alt text for images, but it’s quite bad. So I was excited last week when I realized ChatGPT can write good alt text. If you post a lot on social media, this can save you some real time.

I still edit the text, but it's much faster than writing it myself. And it's often more complete because ChatGPT doesn't get tired and say "good enough." It describes more elements of the image than I probably would.

Here’s the prompt I used:

Here's what it came up with for the following image (which is for an interview that will run in my podcast this week):

Alt text: "Promotional graphic for an interview featuring a smiling man with a beard and glasses, Eli Burnstein, author of 'Dictionary of Fine Distinctions.' The background is split between a warm orange on the top and a muted tan on the bottom. To the left of Eli is an image of the book cover, which displays a red serpent-like creature labeled 'Venomous' and a similar green one labeled 'Poisonous,' illustrating the theme of subtle differences. Above him, in bold white text on the orange, it reads 'INTERVIEW.' Below, on the tan background, the text 'LISTEN NOW' is encased in a green button, and 'Grammar Girl Conversations' is written in a smaller font. The overall feel is warm and inviting, designed to encourage listeners to engage with the content."

It’s not perfect. I did some editing, and next time, I’ll probably do a quick find-and-replace to make the single quotation marks double quotation marks (or give ChatGPT more detailed instructions), but if you post a lot on social media, using AI for the first draft of alt text can save time.

And here’s a bonus non-AI tip: If you post a lot to social media, get a launcher or some other tool that gives you access to your clipboard history, which helps you more quickly paste in alt text, teaser, links, and hashtags on different social media platforms.

I use the free level of Raycast for the Mac. (And quickly found I didn’t want to live without it. It was the first thing I reinstalled after my computer crashed a couple of months ago.)

If you’re on Windows, it looks as if you can just hit the Windows logo key + V, but I haven’t tried it myself.

WSJ reporter used AI for ‘everything’ for two weeks

After documenting all the ways he used AI for two weeks, Christopher Mims’ takeaway mirrors mine: “The last time I had an experience this eye-opening and transformative was after I bought my first smartphone.”

He reports that the most popular AI training courses are “deeply practical ones, including ones that small businesses can use to multiply the productivity of whoever is in charge of their marketing. No one is expecting ad copy or Instagram posts to be works of art, and generating that kind of content, or even just rewriting or re-cutting existing content for different platforms, is a lot of work.”

Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI

The Texas Education Agency usually hires about 6,000 temporary workers to grade open-ended questions on the state’s Assessments of Academic Readiness exams, but this year, that number will drop to less than 2,000 with the difference being made up by AI.

According to The Verge, “AI essay-scoring engines are nothing new. A 2019 report from Motherboard found that they were being used in at least 21 states to varying degrees of success.” Twenty-five percent of the Texas exam questions that are graded by AI will also be graded by humans to look for problems with the system.

Quick Hits

8 more U.S. newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement — Axios

Financial Times licenses content to OpenAI — AI Tool Report

The U.S. government is trying to develop a tool to detect AI-written text. — TechCrunch

AI alerts in hospitals reduced death from heart issues by 90% in a trial of 16,000 patients. — New Scientist

What is AI sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

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^{Written by a human.}