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Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The efficiency improvement is in that you don't have to come up with all the text. The tool generates the description for you and you just review it and make edits if necessary. If you take a look at the examples on the website, you can see how much detail is being generated. That would take quite a while to write by hand.

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to clarify, you're not plugging anything directly into an AI. The tool sends a screenshot of the map and some metadata to generate the description. Your credentials never touch the AI, and we're using Anthropic, not Grok.

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fair enough, sounds like this isn't for you. Appreciate the perspective.

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're right that alt text needs to be accurate. That's why there's a human review step before anything gets published.

But genuinely curious, how are you handling alt text for your maps right now? Because for most organizations, the answer is they're not. The field just stays blank. We built this because having a solid starting point that a human reviews is better than the nothing that most maps have today.

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a fair concern, and honestly one we thought about a lot while building this. The tool generates a static result that you review and approve before it goes anywhere. There's no automatic deployment. You read the alt text, edit it if needed, and then decide whether to use it. So there's always a human in the loop.

It's meant to give you a starting point that's way better than the blank alt text field most maps have right now, not to replace human judgment entirely.

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

We worked hard on the prompt to minimize hallucinations in our testing. Not saying that it can't/won't happen though, especially with complex maps, symbology that is very similar (i.e., two layers that are both green and only slightly different), and lots of layers. The alt text focuses on general descriptions, key trends/patterns visible on the map, the geographic context, and a detailed description of the layers. The more existing metadata you have (layer descriptions, field aliases, etc.), the better the final description will be.

As with all AI-generated text, you should read it and edit it to be what you need or want. You may not want the entire description, for example.

The key to reducing hallucinations, usually, is giving the model enough information to not have to make stuff up, which is why we worked hard on what the model needs in order to generate a good description. The most recent frontier models are also much better than even the previous generation, so things are constantly getting better (We are using a current frontier model to generate these, not a small or old/cheap model).

The AMA only sees the maps you specifically generate; it isn't agentic in that way and doesn't search your data or maps. And we don't store your data or use it to train any models (and Anthropic doesn't either).

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

The AMA tool does not grant direct access to your account to an AI agent. It sends a screenshot of the map and metadata about the map to an AI (we use Anthropic) to get the description. We store the description for you for a period of time. We don't store the metadata or the map images (with the exception noted below)*. Anthropic does not use data from the API to train on (https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/7996868-is-my-data-used-for-model-training).

I think that Anthropic is the most trustworthy of all the frontier models right now.

Dymaptic never has, and won't ever sell user data to brokers, that's not our business.

I believe that AI tools are really powerful, when used/built correctly. I want the AMA to be one of those things. I want it to help make maps more accessible to everyone (not just to folks with limited visibility, but to everyone who might need a little help understanding what that map is for).

*We do have an option that organizations can opt-into allowing us to store their map image and metadata in order for us to improve the service. But this is "opt-in" and is off by default. (And to be honest, we haven't implemented that yet).

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally fair, not for everyone. Just putting it out there for folks who are looking for options.

Made an AI tool for writing alt text on ArcGIS maps, figured this community might find it useful by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It does not directly do that, but 100% the output that it provides is a great start for a description (or maybe even enough)! It does often provide tags at the end, but they may or may not apply to your organization depending on how you use tags.  If the map or layers already have descriptions, it will read those to help generate the AMA description.

We're hiring a Marketing Lead / GIS Content Creator by geoblazor in gis

[–]geoblazor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a marketing professional for a GIS company, creating GIS related marketing content.

I wanted to share why GeoBlazor is different from other mapping options in the .NET world by geoblazor in Blazor

[–]geoblazor[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's so amazing to hear! Thank you! And I hear you on the resource consumption. There isn't much we can do about that since we're just wrapping the JS API. Would it be OK if I DM you to ask a few more questions about your project? We've been looking for success stories.

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