I am going to go a bit off my beaten path here today and write about something a bit more technical – alt tags. My “regular job” (as in, the one I actually get paid for) is in marketing, specifically on the development side of things. This means I spend most of my days in the world of precision and structure, rather than the freedom of creative endeavors and personal exploration.
Hence the writing and art.
But I came across an article on medium the other day called “The Literary Style of Alt tags” and, well, it got me really thinking about something I never really think about: alt tags.
I know how important they are (they are vital for accessibility and SEO) but in my own personal writing / blog my tendency is to just toss an image on the article and call it done.
But after that article on medium I realized two things:
- By not including alt text with my images I am completely disregarding the needs of a significant percentage of the internet population (this article indicates that there could be as many as 2.94 million active users with visual impairment)
- By not writing decent alt tags, I am basically ignoring a huge resource to generate traffic to my writing. See this HubSpot article for more
The problem
I don’t want to write alt text. It’s not particularly fun, it’s highly time consuming, and after I’ve written a whole article, it almost feels rote.
“What do you mean I need to describe this image? It’s right there! Look at it!” (See point 1 above, self)
The solution
Update! I’ve created two new GPTs though Open AI’s GPTs service for this. Let me know what you think of them!
ChatGPT — Alt Tag Ace — General Alt Tags
ChatGPT — Alt Tag Ace for Products — Product-focused
So. I’ve determined that I don’t have the desire, the time, or the energy to write alt text; what options do I have?
ChatGPT has become a staple of my daily routine, helping with code, cleaning up and streamlining emails, and even whipping up cheese-based images. It’s worth every bit of the 20 bucks a month.

Don’t tell Open AI, but I would pay three times that much for how much ChatGPT helps me stay sane.

There has to be a better way!
I have recently discovered that you can get ChatGPT+ ($20/mo) to write exceptional image descriptions with ease, and just pop them into your articles, providing assistive benefits to your readers, and giving your site that little bit of extra SEO boost.
A Quick aside: Why Alt Tags are important for SEO
Alt tags provide context that search engines use to understand the content of the images, because for now, at least, search engines are unable to “see” images like humans can. And for user experiences, Alt Tags are great to people who are vision impaired, and if the image were to fail to load, the alt text should load in its place. It’s also a great place to put keywords related to your writing, but try to avoid stuffing!
But you know what kills me?
I’ve been sitting on this decade’s greatest accomplishment (so far), I practically live in ChatGPT, and I never had the realization to just feed it images I don’t want to write alt text for.
Granted, the ability to read images with ChatGPT hasn’t been live for long, but MidJourney has been able to describe images for some time now, so I literally have had no excuse! (MidJourney’s base plan is, at the time of this writing, $10 / mo and you can use /describe to describe images that you upload to the service).
Let’s have a quick look and see what ChatGPT can do to simplify and streamline my alt text writing process. We’ll use the same Cheese-Based Image as before:


Here’s the Alt Text that GPT wrote:
“A close-up view of a car tire creatively designed to resemble Parmesan cheese, complete with a realistic cheese texture and holes. The tire is displayed against a backdrop of a garage setting with bicycles in the background. Attached to the tire is a quirky label that reads ‘PARMESAN PACE – Roll with a relish!’ followed by playful, nonsensical text and the website ‘For uniquerides.com.'”
Well.
I don’t even have to change much of that, to be honest. It’s solid – only slightly incorrect (the comment about bicycles is wrong, of course) and with one small adjustment it’s pretty much ready to go. Of particular note, it caught things that I never would have considered, such as the “backdrop of a garage.”
But we can do even better.
ChatGPT is really powerful – the prompts you feed it allow you to tailor the responses to be specifically what you want. This article is about alt tags, right? And that means that the images should, hopefully, rank for alt tags. So what if the image of the cheese wheel was going on a website about cheesy facsimiles?
We can adjust the original prompt to emphasize what we are focusing on – a website that is selling these cheesy facsimiles. That means we want the images on this page to rank for “cheesy facsimiles”.
This is getting absurd.
But let’s roll with it anyway
Here’s the killer, simple query: “Please take a look at this image, of [brief description of what you want to focus on], and write [superlative, such as exceptional] alt text for it. [Optional] Please include [keyword] and / or related words“

Alt Text: “This is a striking image of a car tire transformed into a cheesy facsimile of Parmesan cheese, with a detailed and textured surface that closely mimics the appearance of the actual cheese. The tire hangs in a garage, against a backdrop of bike tires, underscoring the playful and creative reinterpretation of everyday items. A tag labeled ‘PARMESAN PACE’ adds a whimsical touch, inviting viewers to ‘Roll with a relish!’ and directing them to ‘uniquerides.com’ for more such inventive creations.”
Still can’t let go of the bike tires, but whatever, this is why you proofread! The point is – GPT can get you 90% of the way there with your alt text, and this super-hack will save you a ton of time.
Here’s my corrected version of the generated text, including a little bit at the end to add “alt tags” and “ChatGPT”, both things I would like to rank for. It’s also the Alt Text I’ve applied to the cheese wheel image!
A striking image of a car tire, transformed into a cheesy facsimile of Parmesan cheese, with a detailed and textured surface that closely mimics the appearance of the actual cheese. The tire sits in a garage, against a backdrop of car tires, underscoring the playful and creative reinterpretation of everyday items. A tag labeled ‘PARMESAN PACE’ adds a whimsical touch, inviting viewers to ‘Roll with a relish!’ and directing them to ‘uniquerides.com’ for more such inventive creations. This image is being used to demonstrate the effectiveness of ChatGPT+ at generating Alt Tags based on an image source.
In conclusion
Alt tags are an important, and an often forgotten, aspect of posting content online, and can be one of the more annoying, troublesome, and tedious processes. Fortunately, we have tools these days to simplify the process, namely through the use of ChatGPT+ and MidJourney’s describe feature. So get out there and start alt-tagging your images with gusto! If you’ve got ChatGPT+ you literally have no excuse not to.
What awesome ways have you used GPT?