I’m totally blind. Artificial intelligence is helping me rediscover the world.

When I first heard about Be My AI-a new collaboration between Open AI and Be My Eyes, an app that connects sighted volunteers with blind people who need help via video call-I didn't let myself get too excited. Be My AI promised to allow blind people to receive an A.I.-generated description of any photo we uploaded. This was a tantalizing prospect, but it wasn't the first time a tech company had promised to revolutionize the way people with disabilities access visual content. Microsoft had already given us Seeing AI, which in a very rudimentary way provided a rough idea of what was going on in the images we shared, and which allowed us-again, in a fairly basic way-to interact with information contained in written texts. But the details were missing, and in most cases we could know only that there was a person in the picture and what they were doing, nothing more. Be My AI was different.

Suddenly, I was in a world where nothing was off limits. By simply waving my cellphone, I could hear, with great detail, what my friends were wearing, read street signs and shop prices, analyze a room without having entered it, and indulge in detailed descriptions of the food-one of my great passions-that I was about to eat.

I like to make fun of AI" - those quotes are there for a reason - but that doesn't mean it can't be truly useful. This is a great example of this technology providing a tangible, real, and possibly life-altering benefit to someone with a disability, and that's just amazing.

My only gripe is that, as the author notes, the images have to be uploaded to the service in order to be analysed. Cynical as I tend to be, this was probably the intent of OpenAI's executives. A ton of blind people and other people with vision issues will be uploading a lot of private data to be sucked up into the Open AI database, for further AI" training.

But that's easy for me to say, and I think blind people and other people with vision issues will argue that's a sacrifice they're totally comfortable making, considering that they're getting in return.