Honestly, auto generating text descriptions for visually impaired people is probably one of the few potential good uses for LLM + CLIP. Being able to have a brief but accurate description without relying on some jackass to have written it is a bonefied good thing. It isn't even eliminating anyone's job since the jackass doesn't always do it in the first place.

I guess my question would be, why do you need the picture as a visual aid, is the accompanying body text confusing without that visual aid? and if so, by having no alt text, you accept that you will leave VI people confused and only sighted people will have the clarification needed.

If your including a picture of a table with nothing on it, there's a reason, so yes, that alt text is perfectly reasonable.

Personally I wish there was a way to enable two types of alt text on images, for long and quick context.

Because I understand your concern about unnecessary detail, if I'm in a rush "a table with nothing on it" will do for quicker context, but there are times when it's appropriate to go much deeper, "a picture of a hard wood rustic coffee table, taken from a high angle, natural sunlight, there are no objects on the table."

They exist but none of them are perfect - they can't possibly be perfect. It's a bit of an arms race thing where AI images get more accurate and the detection software get more particular to match, however the economic incentives are on the side of the former.

I think so, but I don't have the mental energy at the moment to sit down and figure out if the AI detection software is accessible either. I know some of my colleagues use programs to check student work for LLM plagerism, but I don't assign work that can be done via an LLM so I haven't looked into that, and that's different from the AI images.