4/13/26 - Monthly Essay: "About AI"

Good afternoon ...

No links today. Instead it's time for the next Monthly Essay. This month I try to sort through some thoughts on disability and Artificial Intelligence.

About AI

Andrew Pulrang, Disability Thinking Weekday - April 13, 2026

People have a lot of concerns about Artificial Intelligence, (AI). To name a few:

• How AI consumes and then redistributes original work by people who should be paid for their labor and creativity, and more broadly could lose their ability to make a living if original work by humans is no longer needed or respected in the marketplace.
• Mental health concerns, as AI is both actively promoted, and passively used by people seeking mental health therapy. crisis intervention, or just a kind of companionship. with potentially disastrous results.
• Financial and environmental concerns due to the immense amount of energy apparently required to run AI facilities.
• Collaborations with corporations and the government that would probably upset or terrify us if we knew all the details.
• Doomsday fears of AI becoming independent and self-aware, able to act against human will and well-being, and maybe even seeking to dominate or destroy humanity.

Some of these concerns are practical and clearly plausible. Others seem more like Sci-Fi fever dreams. And yet, the boundary between the immediate and the speculative are fuzzy. The saying, "Anything is possible" is usually so vague as to be meaningless. But in the case of AI, it may be literally true, and relevant to everyone.

AI also has more specific and unique implications for disabled people and disability culture:

• AI has a lot of potential as a suite of highly adaptable, low-cost accessibility tools – especially for people with learning, cognitive, and sensory disabilities who have previously had fewer good assistive technologies than, say, people with physical disabilities have enjoyed for decades.
• Many disabled people rely even more than most on being able to make a living from non-physical, creative, professional, or administrative work that AI could make obsolete, or at least less in demand in the job market.
• There is real risk that AI as a decision-making tool could reproduce, automate, and supercharge already existing human disability discrimination – particularly in hiring, benefits determination, and health care. Put another way, AI can do disability discrimination and mistreatment, (not to mention other forms of prejudice), more efficiently and at a distance, allowing the people behind it to avoid responsibility or claim ignorance.

And then there's the more narrow, personal question of what AI means for this newsletter, and for other disability media. Another disabled writer, Peter Torres Fremlin, has written about how he does and doesn’t use AI in his Disability Debrief newsletter. I shared that piece in the April 16, 2026 edition of Disability Thinking Weekday, and said then that it would prompt me to write a similar article on how I feel about AI, especially in relation to this newsletter. So, here is a summary of my current approach to Artificial Intelligence, both professionally and personally:

• Last Summer, I tried to use AI to create a new set of Instagram art for Disability Thinking Weekday. I didn't like any of the suggestions it offered and I haven't tried again since. I find plain Canva, without its AI enhancements, more than enough to supply my very basic artwork needs.
• I recently deleted ChatGPT from my phone and installed Claude instead. I did this based on the somewhat vague but easily acted on information in this article discussing the different ethical standards and practices of ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, and Claude’s company, Anthropic. It’s a modest step. But small, easy actions towards the good are usually worth taking, and silly not to.
• I can see myself using Claude to look up a specific fact that I don't know or can't remember for something in the newsletter – like a name or a date. I haven’t yet, but I could. My intention would be that any time the answer is at all complex or open to interpretation, I would use AI as the starting point for further research into original sources.
• I will never ask any AI application to help me choose articles to share. I will never have AI write article commentaries, even in draft form for me to edit. I’m not the most exciting or poetic writer in disability culture. My rather mechanical writing style may even read like AI sometimes. Still, human originality is probably going to be an even greater selling point for newsletters like this going forward. And I like choosing articles to share and writing my own thoughts about them in the moment.
• In my private life I used AI last Summer to help arrange pictures and posters on my living room walls, because I have no artistic instinct for that sort of thing. I liked the AI advice a lot, and am very happy with how my living room walls turned out!
• I also occasionally use my AI app to ask questions that come to mind about movies and TV shows I watch, just for fun and to see what it says. For instance:
  • In "There Will Be Blood," are Eli and Paul the same person?
  • Is Decker in "Blade Runner" a replicant?
  • Who shot first, Han or Greedo?
• I won't bore with the details. But none of the replies shocked me – either for their insight or inaccuracy. I’m also kind of interested in asking some interpretive questions like these on disability topics — again, just to see what AI says about them and whether they seem right, off-base, outdated, over-simplified, or maybe too conventional. I haven't tried yet, but here are some examples:
  • Has the Americans with Disabilities Act been effective?
  • Why is the number of people with autism increasing?
  • What is the most respectful terminology to use for people with disabilities?

I guess you could say I am AI curious, especially as a tool of accessibility, though not really for me and my particular disabilities. I am also concerned, though not yet panicked, about the social, economic, political, and environmental implications of AI. And I am committed to AI-free originality in my own writing, including for this newsletter.

What are your thoughts on disability and AI? Please feel free to email your comments to: apulrang@icloud.com.

Disability Thinking Weekday is a Monday-Friday newsletter with links and commentary on disability-related articles and other content. You can help promote Disability Thinking Weekday by forwarding it by email or posting on your social media. You can also comment by sending me an email at: apulrang@icloud.com. Collected comments are shared on the first of each month. A free subscription sends a newsletter to your email each weekday. Benefits of paid subscription include:

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