Screenshot as an API

References

With ML advancements, screenshots are now a universal data format.
- (decoder) relatively easy to extract...
  - meaning (image-to-text)
  - layout information (object recognition)
  - text (OCR)
  - other metadata (formatting, fonts, etc.)
- (encoder) diffusion-based models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E (text-to-image) Prompt Engineering
What's good:
- Easier to parse than highly complex layout formats
  - No need to understand PDF data format
  - No need to hydrate webs for web crawlers
- Universally available, easily copyable
  - Images aren't the most efficient encoding method for text.
  - But they can be the simplest for humans
  - You can copy objects from photos in the latest Apple iOS 16 update.
Permissionless.
- Many applications won't allow you to export data.
- Screenshots are always available.
- Related to when Naver Vibe attempted to steal other music players' market cap with Screenshot Recognition technology.
  - [튜토리얼] 다른 뮤직앱 플레이리스트, 쉽게 가져오는 법
  - '타사 음원 리스트 수초만에 이동' 네이버 바이브에 OCR 적용 - 전자신문
More complex metadata
- Look how effective image search is on mobile. Dogs, City, Oceans...
- Some come from the actual image metadata, and others are inferred with On-device models.
- Automatically encoding this data in traditional formats like PDF takes much longer.
I wrote a reply like the following. Letter to Mr. Matt Rickard on 2022-10-03

It's founder, John Warnock (co-founder of Adobe), prototyped a compatibility layer where documents would look and, most importantly, print (!) the same regardless of the computer they were viewed on (1993 video). This is the PDF.
The "killer app" for PDF was tax returns - the IRS adopted PDF in 1996 because of a rumored frustration with the US Postal Service.
Things that lack:
- Enterprise-grade OCR for PDF documents still doesn't exist in 2022, albeit having state-of-the-art computer vision techniques.
- Interactive and web-enabled forms. Sometimes it saves without the data filled in
- Slow page loads. Better alternatives. EPUB, MOBI for texts. For generic use cases, DjVu.