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That's an accessibility feature and has been around for at least a couple of years, I believe.

I think OP is referring to the fact that the alt-text is now all ML generated. But yes, you are right, it's been around for a while

I noticed that too (mtg meme group just showed up as a wall of "image may contain:text" placeholders), but I didn't realize it was an outage and I thought that I'd accidentally turned on some kind of really annoying safe-mode.

I noticed those too. Except it contained something else.