Raw LLM Responses

Everything you said is one hundred percent correct. I wrote an tumblr post on how ableism is being used as a buzz word to deflect criticism from organizations or people who are being ableist. But here's the relevant part: In the case of NaNoWriMo, instead of actually engaging in people's very real concerns about the unethical nature of LLM/generative AI and its impact on the writing community; they used ableism as a buzz word to silence that criticism. In their own words, they call the discussion of "artificial intelligence has undertones of ableism and classicism." When we dig deeper, NaNoWriMo uses ableist claims about disabled and lower income folks to try to defend their generative AI nonsense. The example I'll speak to is one that impacts me, that of people, who are either neurodivergent and/or with brain injuries and/or illnesses that impact the brain. However, their claim is rooted in several harmful assumptions about what people with those illnesses and injuries can or cannot do. Thus, in an attempt to stop criticism of their actions, they engage in an ableist framework that presents specific disabled people as being unable to do the act of writing ourselves and thus requiring a novel tech solution to solve our issues. People with these injuries and illnesses can and often do write, but what they truly need isn't some novel tech solution like ChatGPT. As a side note, I won't go into the major problems with LLM/generative AI such as their unethical datasets; burying human authors and making it harder to discover us; harmful environmental impact where billions of gallons of water is used yearly and harms watersheds and water access; difficulty in phrasing prompts to get an output that is coherent; hallucinations (as in unreliable output data); misinformation; stealing our works to fuel the unethical datasets; etc. Others articulate that well; I just want to speak to the use of ableism in their statements. What we need is the support of a human community. Better access to resources in general (such as Internet and/or data plans, which are expensive and a lot of low-income people do not have access to reliable services) or devices that fit our needs. For example, for myself, I often have friends who will help with editing for free or a fee I can afford. I also always use dark mode and text-to-speech software. Others may need software or devices that has dsylexic fonts, high or low contrasts, little to no blue light, dark modes, dictation programs, tablets like Remarkable or Kobo where you handwrite and it transforms it into text, etc. Instead of discussing it with people within that community, they used ableism as a buzzword to silence their critics and then tried to justify their harmful actions without any real regard for the actual impact to my community. That is the problem with these people who do not engage in discussions with the communities they claim they are "helping" or "supporting." They instead speak for us as if they know us better than we know ourselves, which is also an ableist framework. For NaNoWriMo, they engaged in a harmful take on how people like me function, and how to them, I cannot write well because my brain doesn't work quite right. So I apparently need their AI sponsor to help me. The amount of ableism in these assumptions is astronomical. So how can we approach the needs of the disability community when it comes to creative works? For one, talk to disabled people from that community and try to include a diversified sample from all sorts of races, ethnicities, classes, genders, etc. 1. We need ethical and accessible designs that includes us, as well as making these tools cheaper to access. For example, Diction software or Handwriting-to-text can be irritatingly expensive to find ones that are fairly accurate. The licensing of these types of software can be expensive too, so building up accurate, free and open-source alternatives would be lovely. This way we can use our own words spoken by us (or handwritten on the tablet). 2. We need a community of people that support us through a diversity of ways (emotionally, physically, intellectually, etc.) As in we need to stop isolating disabled people, and instead include us more holistically. To build up communities of care, where human beings work together to swap skills and help one another build what they envision. 3. We need society to be more accessible and to center accessibility from the get-go. We need to expand the definition of accessibility to include not just physical spaces, but to include information, transportation, justice, sensory, etc. 4. We need society/orgs/people to listen to us and respect us as equally valid as their own selves. To stop speaking for us and allow us to speak about our needs. To stop assuming disabled people can't use their brain at all. We actually do have brains that we use regularly, and the tools that help us articulate our thoughts with our own words using our own brains is far more effective than an generative AI using stolen words. Generative AI can't ever articulate our thoughts better than we can ourselves. What we do not need is people using us as a shield in order to silence criticism.