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A.I. and Disability Authorship: The Moment I Became Legible Was the Moment I Became Suspect
I was really excited about A.I. at first. I thought it was a miracle that during my lifetime I had access to something that could help me put ideas to paper in a way that would allow myself to become intelligible to others. That finally I could be known to others in the way that others got to share their inner life with like-minded people. But now that I can get the thoughts out of my head and into a format that others can understand, I'm still left in the margins. Because when people find out that I write with the assistance of a predictive language model, they assume that it's not me they are learning about, but rather about an A.I. My authorship is stripped and given to the tool I used to make it with, and worse yet, I'm treated like I did something wrong by doing so.
I was called a fraud, plagiarizer, and “a spectacularly terrible person" because they assumed I was trying to get credit for something I didn't deserve. But I never asked for their applause, I never asked to be praised, I only ever asked that I be understood. The value generated from my writing isn't in the technical details of the prose or sentence structure. The value of my writing comes from the message that the prose scaffolds. They think I'm a fraud because I didn't suffer through an English degree to learn to write the way they do without help. What they didn’t see is the suffering I went through to survive in a world not designed for minds like mine, the solitary confinement I've lived in, not of the body but of the mind. So no, it’s not that I didn't suffer for my work, it’s that I didn't suffer the way they think someone should suffer in order to produce work like mine.
Then they tell me I'm selfish, that I'm hurting "real" writers by using A.I. That people are losing their jobs, their livelihoods because of me.
lets be clear. I am hurting no one. writing is not zero sum, the more I do does not mean there is less out there for others. Whats truly selfish is expecting me to refrain from using a tool that allows me to be seen and heard for the first time simply because other people feel entitled to maintain their sense of superiority over others because of their talent with prose. I am not a fraud, I am not a cheat, I am not destroying peoples lives by making myself knowable to others. I am a man who is in pain and longing for connection using the only tool he has.
And so, in a sick, ironic twist that only an existential existence can give, the very tool that made me intelligible to others is also the thing that destroys any credibility I had that would give those words weight. If life is a joke, then .... what a fine and very funny joke it is to be me.
A.I. and Disability Authorship: How Ableist Gatekeepers Can ...
A.I. and Disability Authorship: How Ableist Gatekeepers Can Politely Hop Off My Dick.
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