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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

It’s also pretty useless at understanding any page that’s even remotely complex.

I asked it to tell me when the next baseball home game is so I can avoid traffic when going to the downtown library and it couldn’t answer even that basic question. The search results defaulted to the team’s official calendar but the day numbers were displayed as images so they could style them in the team’s font, making them invisible to ChatGPT.

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This example is more likely due to that specific page/site lacking any kind of accessibility information (e.g. how people who are blind, deaf or have other disabilities can use the internet), rather than being large or complex.

Relatedly, in my experience, for some reason most internet properties relating to anything sports related (MLB, NFL, NHL, or even small town little league) have absolutely terrible, extremely over complicated user interfaces.

How come the lack of disability info would make it hard for ChatGPT to interpret the page? I think I missed a step there.

Because on accessible pages there is alt-text for all graphical elements so that screen readers can get the content for visually impaired users.

ChatGPT seems to be able to parse images pretty well now. I wonder why they don't simply feed it a screencap of the rendered page instead of the html.

Takes much longer to make a screencap of an html page. Modern slow JS and many subresources coming from a slow server, combined with the fact there is no reliable signal to say a page is done loading, generally mean you won't be getting a screencap in less than about 10 seconds.

No alt attributes or does GPT miss those?

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