Gregory's Server
The enshittification of AI has lead to the choice of AI used by VLC to be groaned at. I even saw a post cross my feed of someone looking for a replacement for VLC.
VLC is working on on-device realtime captioning. This has nothing to do with generating images or video using AI. This has nothing to do with LLMs.
(edit: There's claims VLC is using a local LLM. It will use whisper.cpp, and not be using OpenAI's models. I don't know which models they will be using. I cannot find any reference to VLC using a LLM.)
While it would be preferred to use human generated captions for better accuracy, this is not always possible. This means a lot of video media is inaccessible to those with hearing impairment.
What VLC is doing is something that will contribute to accessibility in a big way.
AI transcription is still not perfect. It has its problems. But this is one of those things that we should be hoping to advance.
I'm not looking to replace humans in creating captions. I think we're very far from ever being able to do this correctly without humans. But as I said, there's a ton of video content that simply do not have captions available, human generated or not.
So long as they're not trying to manipulate the transcription using GenAI means, this is the wrong one to demonize.
#AI #Transcription #VLC #HearingImpaired #Deaf #Accessibility
The enshittification of AI has lead to the choice of AI used by VLC to be groaned at. I even saw a post cross my feed of someone looking for a replacement for VLC.
VLC is working on on-device realtime captioning. This has nothing to do with generating images or video using AI. This has nothing to do with LLMs.
@bedast I appreciate this take. I am a huge AI skeptic, but if everything is demonized it all becomes alarmist noise. I love the idea of AI being able to help people and support its usage for that purpose. I just don’t know if it will be put to such purposes (in any meaningful way) in the current tech environment, where endless growth and shareholder supremacy are practically tenets of a new religion. There’s no incentive to be thoughtful, slow down, and add the necessary guardrails.
@bedast Thank you for this clarification. A coworker of mine who deals with oral histories has been using AI for transcription, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't initially wince on hearing that.
@bedast
Sounds a good idea to me, the tool can take a video and create captions. Your comment about humans being more accurate is also good, as surely once those captions have been created, a human can go through them, and I would assuek captions are stored in a external file, if this can be edited then the human job would be to simply edit the file and correct any minor errors.
Any tools that can make life a little easier is surely welcome. Perhaps the importantj point though is also transparancy, if you have used a tool to transscribe this should be clearly stated, so people know how the captions have been generated.
@bedast
Sounds a good idea to me, the tool can take a video and create captions. Your comment about humans being more accurate is also good, as surely once those captions have been created, a human can go through them, and I would assuek captions are stored in a external file, if this can be edited then the human job would be to simply edit the file and correct any minor errors.