this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Comic Strips
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Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
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- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
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Transcription
A cartoon of a woman standing next to a coffee machine, holding out a takeaway coffee container. She smiles as she asks "Frankenstein?"The same woman, now with no visible mouth, in a wider shot, showing two figures raising their hands and looking at each other: a man in a lab coat, glasses, and with grey frizzly hair, and a depiction of "Frankenstein's monster" as soon in popular culture.
Is this AI generated?
Probably not. I think most of these are human volunteers
You're right, it's just me 😊
Volunteer singular, maybe. It's the same person on every post I've seen today.
To me it just doesn't seem to satisfy the purpose of alt text. It reads a lot more like an LLM being asked to visually describe what it sees. It's too verbose.
Sure, and yes, it's literally doing what alt text would do, for the same purpose (i.e. describe the image for the visually impaired). The "style" of these that I've seen (not just here) is pretty verbose, so I don't think that's necessarily an indication of llm use. Obviously I can't prove it either way, but I'd rather give these the benefit of the doubt, since this is useful work if it helps people follow along.
The visually impaired don't really get anything from descriptions like "in a wider shot" though, nor is "now with no visible mouth" a relevant detail because the style of the comic does not depict any character with a mouth unless they are speaking. That's LLM logic.
I actually tend to do these less verbose than what I've seen is common with others. I concentrate first on getting across the specific message of the post, and second on describing details that help get across the mood.
The wide shot is an important detail, because it explains why we didn't see the other subjects in the first frame. The lack of visible mouth felt important to me because it contrasts with the smile in the first frame, the lack of smile (or indeed any mouth) gives it a weirder feeling.
Your initial comment seemed like a fairly innocent question and I was happy to answer it, but seeing the thread continue, it's looking more like a baseless accusation. And that's dickhead behaviour. Don't do that. To me, or to others. It's extremely rude, and honestly provides nothing of value. It's especially galling to be accused when I'm spending my effort trying to make this a more inclusive space.
Not baseless, I explained my reasoning. If you say it's not the case, that's fine.
I'm sorry, but "he described the people with no mouths as having no mouths" is a bullshit reason. Just...don't make accusations like that. It's a shitty thing to do.
If you want to ask a polite question, that's one thing, but going on and on through a thread trying to persuade someone else of a completely baseless and unfair accusation is really low behaviour.
And if you had been right, what then? What would you have gained? Weigh the consequences of your actions. When the potential upside is almost-nil, and the probability you're right is a complete toss-up, it's not worth it.
Yeah, that's fair. The mouth description probably seals it for me. I think it'd be more useful to describe the overall "nonplussed" expression than the literal description.
Nope, just me! 😊
Back on Reddit, I was a co-mod of a sub with the guy who founded the "transcribers of Reddit", and that helped instill in me an appreciation for the value of accessibility.
It's not too hard to do and I'd encourage anyone to give it a go. There's no need for perfection, and you get a better sense of it as you get used to doing it.
Mastodon and Pixelfed both yell at users to provide alt text for their own posts, but unfortunately Lemmy's devs don't seem to have quite the same care for accessibility.
no? or do you mean the transcript
The transcript, yeah.