Generative AI Strikes Again

The folks at Chaosium recently reported on generative AI image descriptions used in one of their publications without their knowledge. It turns out that newer versions of Adobe InDesign will automatically create these and include them when you export a PDF. And you will be shocked to learn, as with so many things with AI, that some of the descriptions were wrong.

And you know who else uses Adobe InDesign? That's right, it's ME! I had even noticed InDesign creating these little descriptions while laying out the new edition of Toon. Never did it occur to me they would have been exported along with everything else without my review or approval. Fortunately, all our published PDFs are manually marked for accessibility, including image descriptions. So they would have been caught in editing before being released. Still, it's not unheard of for us to send out PDFs early for things like reviews or playtesting. How embarrassing it would have been to send something with AI-generated errors out for a review. Especially after just recently publicly stating we're against that sort of thing.

So thanks to Chaosium for their warning. It may very well have saved us from some headaches over here.

-- Ben Williams