Post by @billyjoebowers@mastodon.online

@billyjoebowers@mastodon.online 1 hr. ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@benroyce/117590491162871806

I understand the points, but I'm not sure I agree. The "good uses of AI" argument is sort of like the argument that animal torture, or even human torture, can lead to great gains and help a lot of people.

I'm still against it.

⏩︎VOTE⏪︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce)

@benroyce@mastodon.social 2 hr. ago

@jscholes @matt

i'm extremely anti-AI but i've noticed two disabled people advocating for it on mastodon and came around to their point of view in the context of disability

we are against oligarchs destroying society with AI

but in our fight against AI, we can't mag dump on everyone who says something positive about it without looking to see why they say what they do

i am not against protein folding or cosmology research or disabled people extending their reach. and you reading should not be

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⏩︎VOTE⏪︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce)

@benroyce@mastodon.social 1 hr. ago

@billyjoebowers

i am very much anti-AI

but in the specific context of disabled people, i hold my fire

ideally in the future they can use local AI. but i will not go after disabled people who consider it a great benefit in their lives

Cheeseness

@Cheeseness@mastodon.social 54 min. ago

@benroyce @billyjoebowers I'm a little unsettled by anything that lets people who produce stuff that's meant to be accessible feel like they can do so without putting effort in.

Eg: ML generated subtitles are currently pretty bad on YouTube, Nebula, etc., but I see people making videos celebrating that they don't have to care about writing subtitles anymore.

I'm for accessibility tools for users, but I think creators to ceasing to care/outsource that to LLMs is a net loss for everybody.

Jigme Datse

@JigmeDatse@social.openpsychology.net 10 min. ago

@Cheeseness@mastodon.social @benroyce@mastodon.social @billyjoebowers@mastodon.online My thing about the use of LLMs for subtitles, is "would the video be posted without subtitles, or not at all if the LLM isn't doing the subtitles." I find the subtitles (haven't checked the latest video) for my talky videos on PeerTube tend to be reasonable. Yeah, I need to tweak them. But if it weren't for that, chances are the videos would end up not being posted at all.

I do agree with people who have the resources to hire someone, deciding not to. That's just not something I am a fan of at all.

Even with feeling that I wouldn't post my videos without the auto captioning, I'm still a bit iffy about that. Maybe the world would be better off without them, at least until I can find a way that I can put more effort in.

Cheeseness

@Cheeseness@mastodon.social 6 min. ago

@JigmeDatse @benroyce @billyjoebowers I'm not sure if it would be helpful for your specific use case, but I wrote this F/OSS transcription aid years ago and use it when writing subtitles for my videos https://transcriberer.jbushproductions.com/

It frustrates me that PeerTube wastes resources on auto-generating captions if I don't add my own fast enough :(

⏩︎VOTE⏪︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce)

@benroyce@mastodon.social 49 min. ago

@Cheeseness @billyjoebowers

well the problem is it's an extremely wide topic

so there is AI slop machines which we all hate

then there's stuff like this:

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5449081/people-who-have-lost-their-voices-are-using-ai-technology-to-regain-them

people using AI to reconstruct their voices lost to cancer/ injury/ etc

that's obviously not the same thing as what we despise

so when we deal with disabled people using AI, we can't just come out swinging. that's my point. there is nuance here, and we need to cut disabled people some slack

Cheeseness

@Cheeseness@mastodon.social 39 min. ago

@benroyce @billyjoebowers Sure. As I said, I'm all for accessibility tools for users.

I'm also wary of conflating bespoke for-purpose LLMs and the trained-on-everything LLM-as-a-service platforms that everybody calls "AI" these days. These feel like different domains and are effectively different technologies in how they're created and utilised.

A subscription model for a synthesised voice described in that article sounds dystopian. This could be done locally, owned and controlled by the user

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