Reddit seems to use Ai to analyze images, so the content can be indexed by the search. In example I searched for my name (which is also used for the my blog) to see if there are recent posts with “thingsiplay”, because I saw some spike in the stats. But what I instead found is a screenshot of a comment from me made in YouTube. There is no text attached to the post or title, so it must have analyzed the content, right?
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=thingsiplay&t=week results in
and the post is
Or did I miss something and I make myself a fool here? Does any other community software or forum do this? Is this covered in their User Agreement?
OpticalCharacterRecognition is a pretty common practice that’s been around for a century… (1920s)
It makes a lot of sense when you consider those with visual impairments.
Could have been alt text
Posting images on Reddit allow to add alt-text? And the user has to add the name as alt-text, otherwise it wouldn’t have one. I don’t remember that was even possible.
I think there’s an option to add captions. I left during the June strike wouldn’t know
You can add captions to images inside text posts - those are used for alt text. You can’t add alt text to image posts though.
Trust me, I would know.
Incidentally, they’re automatically adding the subreddit and post title together for the image’s alt text, which still doesn’t include OP’s name.
Not an expert in it, but this isn’t necessarily AI, it could be good ol’ image text recognition that has existed for years now.
It would make sense to include matching images in the search results and other engagement driven recommendations. There are quite a few screenshots too, so if the search can only handle text, it’s going to completely miss a pretty large category.
Given the recent cooporation with Google and that Google has excellent image text recognition, isn’t this a safe bet? Otherwise Reddit would have this done without AI for years.
