I do find all this AI stuff to be very interesting indeed, although as
has been said, I can't see it replacing the screen reader entirely; it
may work better as a supplemental tool, much like the way BeMyAI
complements and supplements the BeMyEyes volunteer. As it stands now, I
can actually ask several open source AI models to describe a picture
taken with my phone's camera and get a halfway decent response back in
about the same time as it takes to upload the same picture to BeMyEyes
and wait for its AI to come back with a response.
The main problem with the AI replacing the screen reader though is not
speed, but hallucination, which is still a huge problem with every model
I've ever used for any purpose. I mean BeMyAI described one of the 2000
gold dollar coins as a giant penny, complete with Lincoln's face and
all. But I knew it was hallucinating, because I knew exactly what coin I
was holding. Many times when the AI hallucinates, we don't know that is
what is happening.
And the bigger problem is that I don't want my computer to try to think
for me. My workflow is pretty straightforward. I want to do something, I
either look in the menu or type in a command to find it, the computer
does it. Or I'm on a website, I want to see what is on the page, and if
I'm lucky, the headers are marked so that I at least get a nice idea.
And if I want a page summary before I get started, my screen reader can
do that at the press of a button. I don't see any benefit of AI here,
with the obvious exception of text recognition or helping to map out an
otherwise inaccessible window so that its characteristics can be sent to
the screen reader, which could then read what was sent to it by the AI
as I interact with it normally. I don't want a detailed description of
the whole window, only the control I'm focusing on at the time and any
text that may need my attention when the window pops up. AI descriptions
now are still a bit too wordy, sometimes leading to additional confusion
rather than a straightforward workflow.
Yes, I for one enjoy the graphical desktop and the consistency that it
provides, i.e. one key combination has its function everywhere instead
of all these little programs having different key sequences that all end
up doing the same thing; e.g. if I press a q here, it closes the
application, but if I press it in another application, nothing happens,
and I was supposed to use control+x, which incidentally is the cut
command *everywhere* on the MATE desktop and GNOME as well. I notice
nothing slow about writing this message in Thunderbird, which used to be
pretty darn slow just 10 or so years ago, but is smooth now, and this is
on a laptop that is about 8 years old and a desktop that is about 12. So
I can see how in the future, AI may become useful enough locally that it
can be just as fast as interacting with a graphical desktop is now. But
then most AI models still rely too heavily on the GPU, so this may come
at some point down the road, not I fear in the next year or so, but
maybe in the next 10. Still, the above problems of hallucination and its
attempts to think for me are still a bit off-putting to me, even if they
can fix the lag problems it would introduce now.
~Kyle
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