As the title suggests, Mozilla is experimenting with using on-device Generative AI to generate alt text. Here are some meandering thoughts.
This raises the question whether it makes sense to invest in AI generated alt-text in the source, as a feature of your content editing software. Projects like these might be redundant in the long run. Or maybe not? 🤔
It depends on what alt text is for. Its primary use is for accessibility, obviously (I hope). But this can be crawled, or otherwise reused, by machines. In general, if we assume content is read more than written, it might be is less wasteful to automatically generate alt text in the source, regardless of who reads it - humans with assisting technologies, or other machines.