Data flow for AI generated ALT text in emails

Question

In my email I find:

[A blue circle with a white bird in it Description automatically generated with medium confidence]

instead of the logo of Twitter. (See attached image for example).

I understand that this is an AI generating this text. But where does this AI run?

Is the AI run on my local Microsoft Outlook client that runs on my laptop (in other words: Would this also work if I had no internet access)?

Is the AI run on our Microsoft Exchange server locally hosted on-prem at our office (in other words: Would this work if I sit at the office and the office's internet connection is down)?

Is the AI run as a cloud service at Microsoft? (in other words: Does my system send the image to Microsoft's servers which then generate a reply and send that back (possibly through the Image Analysis 4.0 REST API))?

Is there a way to disable the functionality?

(I was redirected from: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/outlk_win-outtop_classic-outsub_ofb/data-flow-for-ai-generated-alt-text-in-emails/228edf3d-dab5-4a00-9051-a60026063ea3?messageId=7fdc3804-c0fa-4241-8da8-faec8683674b)

Answer 1

I tested by inviting a Protonmail account: Here I feel confident that no automatic AI will do the ALT-text . In other words: It must have been done before.

And the ALT-tag was also received on Protonmail.

I then tried inserting a new image, and the new image did not get the automatic ALT-text. Only the images in my signature got this.

When creating a new mail, I examined the icons of the signature, and here is the ALT-text. So it is either generated in the editor of Microsoft Outlook or the image already has the information.

Microsoft Outlook has an option for generating ALT text, and when clicking that it updates the ALT text with a new description. But only when I click.

So all in all it seems that the icons in my signature have been "born" with the ALT text: It is not generated for each mail. Instead the program that created these possibly did the automatic ALT text.

As long as you have to actively click a button to send the image to the ALT text generator, I can live with that.

Answer 2

Hi @Prosaole ，

So all in all it seems that the icons in my signature have been "born" with the ALT text: It is not generated for each mail. Instead the program that created these possibly did the automatic ALT text.

Based on my research, I totally agree that it's likely these Alt text comes with the icons themselves rather than generated in Outlook.

From the perspective of Outlook client side, options related to ALT text are limited to the ALT Text button as you mentioned above and the Automatic Alt Text setting in the Options below:

If you can see the Alt text of these icons when the above option is turned off and you don't manually insert the Alt text either, I suppose we can conclude that these icons are "born" with the Alt text.

By the way, can I understand from the description that you are concerned about the display format of your signature, which contains the Facebook or Twitter icon? If so, I'd recommend following the recommendations of the official article below to setup your signature and see if it can make the icon image display properly for recipients.

Insert hyperlinks to Facebook and Twitter in your email signature

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