So how exactly is a blind user supposed to be able to tell if the AI is hallucinating? How dangerous is this going to be?
> Be My AI is perfect for all those circumstances when you want a quick solution or you don’t feel like talking to another person to get visual assistance.
It presumably will be getting used in low risk situations.
Please dont project the typical AI-angst into this assistive technology. It doesnt deserve this, especially from people without hands-on experience.
I don't know about other countries, but here in Switzerland I've had the app for five years and got only 4 requests for help during that time, which made me think that there were way more helpers than help-seekers. But I suppose they wouldn't be adding AI if that was the case.
Yes, about 15:1.
https://www.bemyeyes.com/blog/4-million-volunteers-strong
https://www.bemyeyes.com/blog/what-would-you-do-with-5-milli...
Of course, they explicitly push responsibility to the user by saying things like:
> No. Do not use Be My AI for scanning medicines, reading dosages, or other safety issues
God forbid that we acknowledge this tech is fundamentally flawed. There’s money to be made!
I suspect most of the anger in this thread is just the usual anti-AI stance, but it honestly feels extremely patronizing in this context.
AI right now ain't no god, but the gap between AI mistakes and human mistakes isn't that wide.
On the plus side, I suppose in this application with the humans there's always a risk of a malicious volunteer outright lying, which presumably isn't a risk with the AI solution.
I've been playing with Be My AI, it's excellent. It's got a really good prompt that enables it to be really descriptive and helpful with very little hallucination. It's actually a lot better at describing most photos than the average person is.
Making the world more accessible to blind people is a big challenge. There are no perfect solutions, but the solutions we do have today are enabling millions of blind people to have full careers and live independently.
This is a great improvement. It's not perfect, but neither were the previous technologies that blind people have been using. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
This argument that "humans are flawed too" is not useful, we know humans are flawed, that's why we want tech to fill those gaps, not flawed / potentially dangerous tech, actual tech like how a plane flies you to your destination 99.9% of the time.
1. Take a photo of a piece of tech: AI can not only describe what's going on but tell you exactly how to fix it (e.g. "it's showing a fatal error. hold down the power button for 10 seconds to reboot it") 2. Take a photo of clothing: AI uses consistent, neutral language to describe garments, while humans would all describe the same item differently based on where they live, their own personal style, their region, etc. 3. Take a photo in a major city or near a famous landmark, AI will recognize it and tell you about your location, whereas a random human has probably never been there before 4. Take a photo of an insurance bill, AI can explain what some of the technical terms mean if you don't understand them 5. Take a photo of a menu, ask it to summarize all of the vegetarian entrees and it will list them in seconds ("one veggie burger, one stir fry with tofu, three sandwiches and all of the salads"); a human might take a minute or two to carefully read the menu and give a much longer answer
To be fair, humans make mistakes at an incredible rate. Even the ones who make life or death decisions.
I'm talking about the constant stating of the obvious, if these models weren't useful we wouldn't deploy them. It's like the whole internet constantly making the statement "cars are better at covering distances in shorter time frames than humans"...we know, that's why we build them and pay a bunch of money for them.
I don't believe that Be My Eyes is a for-profit entity.
In some sense, I was a non-AI solution that enabled them to do their activities of daily living.
I'm pretty sure they'd have preferred not to be dependent on me, though. I imagine that's true here, too--no more need to edit your behaviour/filter your thinking/navigate interpersonal stuff just to do something minor.
Humans have well understood failure modes, and society has an existing framework for handling issues that arise between humans.
I wonder who will be held responsible when Be My Eyes AI tells someone to step into traffic? My guess is no one.
> Be My AI is perfect for all those circumstances when you want a quick solution or you don’t feel like talking to another person to get visual assistance.
This summer I used Google Translate to pick medicine in Italy and it was pretty good at translating labels - definitely better than pharmacist who did not speak English at all.
By the way, lots of people die in US because wrong medicine was dispensed - and that has nothing to do with AI. People are imperfect and many drug names are long, incomprehensible and easy to confuse with each other.
Lots of blind people have their homes set up with everything carefully arranged and no hazards. They prepare food, clean their house, commute to school, to jobs, and to appointments via familiar routes with no dangerous intersections, or they might use buses, trains, and Uber / Lyft just like millions of other people who aren't blind.
Being blind can be full of annoyances and frustrations, but I think it's a stretch to say that it's "dangerous".
That’s wrong and immoral. The world is full of risk. As individuals we choose to accept some risks and move on with our lives. I think it’s appropriate that blind people are given the same opportunity