Note: The written portion of this post was generated using AI based on my original podcast episode, which you can listen to above. I also used AI to construct a podcast outline, adding my own embellishments as I’m following it while recording. I explain why I make this choice as a disabled creator in this post.
A few days after posting my last episode about AI and accessibility, I received a powerful message from a fellow comrade. They wanted to remain anonymous but asked me to share their story – an essay they had written months ago about the intersection of AI, accessibility, and care. Their words touched me deeply, and I knew they needed to be shared with our community. First, I'll share their essay in full, then we'll explore its broader implications together.
The Essay: A Public Service Announcement to Those Holding Out Against AI
The following is my comrade's essay, shared with their permission:
A public service announcement to those holding out against AI.
First of all, let's clarify one thing. AI is actually machine learning, aggregating massive amounts of data to produce intelligent results based on human inquiry. It's still very powerful, very useful, and very destructive, but it's not independently intelligent. Self-sentient Artificial Intelligence remains, for now, science fiction. My estranged husband was one of the lead architects for Vaccines.gov during the pandemic. Machine learning saves lives. AI saves lives.
Now I'd like to tell you about Princess Rihanna. Of course that isn't her name, but she loves Rihanna and I have to keep her privacy. She also loves Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Biggie, Cardi B, Harry Styles, the Wiggles, and the animated Little Mermaid. She likes the new Little Mermaid too but gets bored after half an hour. She loves dancing with her paras, held gently under her delicate arms with her tiny feet tapping the floor. Her visits to band practice always end in her giving applause. She also claps when she watches boys make shots while we watch free time at the gym. She smiles for anyone who plays basketball, but she claps for the boys. The guys who take the time to see her as their peer will sometimes stop to give her a gentle fist bump.
Princess Rihanna is a medically fragile special needs student I worked with at a public high school. She's nonverbal and a wheelchair user. Prior to COVID, she was walking daily with a mobility device, but she regressed when schools shut down for a year and a half. Due to chronic short staff, and the incident following below, we have been unable to help her regain that progress. But she loves being at school, she loves her classmates and she loves her paras and she loves her teachers. She loves the attention she gets strolling through the hallways because everyone knows Princess Rihanna.
Something important to understand about special needs students, especially medically fragile ones like Princess Rihanna: School is their second home. Some of them have a few other opportunities to socialize, but most do not because our world is not open to them, and no one other than their family understands and sees their humanity the way their teachers, paras, and classmates do. We have students who are "locked in," fully developed in maturity but unable to move anything other than a few facial muscles.
Their peers largely ignore them, even students in fancy classes like Modern Psychology and Introduction to Nursing, but not because they are cruel. Our more profoundly disabled students are often isolated to a few select classrooms in corners of the building their gen ed peers rarely see. They're ignorant, and few attempts are made to educate them. Putting on an assembly feels like invading our students' privacy and turning them into a spectacle. Introducing gen ed peers a few at a time is force feeding disconnect. Everyone is too tired to explore the options in between. The isolation is heart wrenching.
A few months ago, Princess Rihanna had an accident at home. It wouldn't have been a life or death emergency if not for her medical history. She was immediately admitted to the kind of ICU where agonized screams wrack the halls and spent months in the hospital before transferring to a rehab clinic.
Her team at school was devastated. Not only was our beloved student in pain, she was isolated with people who didn't know how to communicate with her, other than her mother who can't work full time to keep her insurance and also stay by her daughter's side. The nurses don't know how to make her smile. They don't know what music she likes. They don't know which books she'll let them read to her, she won't have any books at all because she destroys them like many developmentally divergent people do. The tactile feel of ripping paper, the act of severing something to make more, is a glimmer of the autonomy they've been robbed of. They don't know she needs her lanyard and her badge. She wears it at school every single day and clutches it for 6 hours straight, unless she's reaching for someone else's badge or grabbing her paras' hair and laughing. Princess Rihanna is sassy.
We had to do something but our options are very, very limited. Sending a care package for a medically fragile person of any age is a delicate task, especially if they're in the hospital. Rihanna doesn't engage much with toys. She likes music, dancing, basketball, her tiny collection of books, her badge, and attention. Mom knows what music she likes. We can't bring her a basketball hoop and the varsity team, though we mused over it. The only practical things we could send were a book she couldn't destroy, her badge, and somehow our presence, even though visitation was against school policy.
Enter AI. If you're not familiar with social stories, they're an invaluable tool for special needs students. Most have very little control over their lives, more so than most teens, and expectations are an important way of giving them some autonomy while setting boundaries. For instance, if you're taking your student to the zoo, you could write a short social story about spending the day outside and the animals they might see and how important it is to be gentle and not bang on the freaking glass or scream at the monkeys thank you very much unnamed student of dubious enthusiasm. It also allows students to prepare themselves mentally for scary things like going to the doctor, or difficult things like when you're allowed to use your phone at school, or sad things like losing a pet. Our occupational therapist can write a social story in a couple weeks, carefully selecting cue words from their IEPs and spending hours hunting stock sites for people and situations that match each student's unique experience. With AI, we were able to create a story in 48 hours. We wrote about how pain is hard but it isn't forever. That hospital people are new but they love her too. Her classmates made digital signatures as their paras held their hands. We used an AI art generator to create a cartoon image of Princess Rihanna in her home, the hospital, and back at school. We curated the little girl and her mom to be a representation of her and her family. Over the weekend the images were printed on textile, a pillow book was made, and her mom picked it up on the way home from work. The turnover from inspiration to her bedside was less than a week.
I know plenty of artists will say, "But I would have—" Tell us how to find you. Tell us how you'll commit to the turnover AI can offer. Tell us how you'll do it for free, not exposure, just free. Tell us how you're going to save the world because you're hurting that art was stolen.
That's a valid reason to be hurting, but our entire foundation as a society is built on theft.
In 1860 Antonio Meucci invented the telephone but neglected the patent. Alexander Graham Bell snatched it up and now he's taught in every elementary school as the man who created it.
The Monopoly franchise was stolen by Charles Darrow and sold to the Parker Brothers. It's made over 3 billion.
Can we talk about the thousands of museums across the globe filled with stolen art and artifacts?
Or how HeLa cells are used in almost every single medical laboratory in the world, stolen from an American Black woman without her knowledge or consent?
Remember when we were all pirates stealing music with unadulterated glee? LimeWire still exists.
The heist of human creation on this level is unprecedented. I won't argue that. But so is the technology, and the technology itself is not what stole from us. The people running it did. Capitalism did. Capitalism is theft. It steals labor, it steals wages, it steals innovation, it steals lives. And now it steals art on a scale we couldn't fathom prior to accelerated technology.
Unpacking the Deeper Messages: Where Technology Meets Humanity
Reading this story felt like a spiritual experience for me. As someone who works at the intersection of technology and plant science, specifically in bioinformatics and data science, I understand deeply how AI and machine learning can be tools for both harm and healing. But there's something more profound happening in this narrative that we need to sit with.
The Reality of Rest Under Capitalism
Let's talk about something that often gets overlooked in conversations about AI and ethics: rest. Capitalism doesn't just steal our labor and our art – it steals our capacity to replenish ourselves. For disabled folks like me, who start with lower energy reserves, this theft is especially devastating.
When Princess Rihanna's community needed to act quickly to support her, they faced a choice: spend weeks creating a social story traditionally, or use AI to bridge the gap. This wasn't just about efficiency – it was about preserving the limited energy resources of an already stretched-thin support system.
The False Binary of Technology Ethics
The essay beautifully challenges the binary thinking that often dominates discussions about AI. Yes, the concerns about AI's role in art theft and exploitation are valid. But when we frame the conversation only in terms of theft and exploitation, we miss something crucial: how these tools can give marginalized communities some of their power back.
Think about it – in less than a week, AI helped create a personalized, durable connection between a medically fragile student and her support system. This isn't about replacing human care; it's about extending its reach when systems fail us.
Community Care in Practice
What strikes me most about this story is how it demonstrates true community care in action. Princess Rihanna's school community didn't just see her medical needs – they understood her full humanity. They knew:
The music that made her smile
The importance of her badge and lanyard
How she interacts with books
The way she expresses her autonomy
Her relationships with classmates and staff
This deep, nuanced understanding of her needs guided their use of technology. They didn't just throw AI at the problem; they used it as one tool in a larger toolkit of care.
The Intersection of Disability Rights and Technology Access
As a disabled creator myself, I see a parallel between Princess Rihanna's story and broader conversations about accessibility. Just as her school is her second home because "our world is not open to them," many disabled people find that certain spaces – physical and digital – are closed to us unless we have access to supportive tools.
When we reject technological tools outright because of their potential for misuse, we risk further isolating already marginalized communities. This doesn't mean accepting exploitation – it means fighting for ethical development and deployment of technology while acknowledging its vital role in accessibility.
Moving Forward: A Call for Nuanced Revolution
So where do we go from here? I believe we need to:
Decolonize Our Minds
Move beyond individualistic thinking about technology and art
Recognize how capitalism shapes our views of both creation and care
Center multiply marginalized voices in these conversations
Reframe Rest as a Right
Acknowledge that rest isn't a privilege but a fundamental need
Support tools and systems that make rest more accessible
Challenge the capitalist notion that we must "earn" rest
Build Collective Power
Support both artists affected by AI AND disabled individuals who rely on it
Create community-based solutions for care and support
Use technology strategically while fighting its exploitation
Practice Radical Empathy
Listen to stories from the margins
Consider multiple perspectives in ethical debates
Recognize that harm reduction sometimes means using imperfect tools
Looking Forward
I'm deeply grateful to my anonymous comrade for sharing this story and allowing me to amplify it. It reminds us that in our fight against exploitative systems, we must not sacrifice accessibility and care. Sometimes, resistance looks like using the master's tools to build bridges while we work on dismantling the master's house.
Stay tuned for more resources I'll be sharing soon – practical tools and strategies for building sustainable, accessible community care. For those interested in supporting this work monetarily, I'm developing materials that will help both individuals and communities thrive in these challenging times.
With love and solidarity,
Nyssa
This written post was generated using AI based on my original podcast episode. I also used AI to construct a podcast outline, adding my own embellishments as I’m following it while recording. AI allows me to preserve energy while still sharing valuable insights with my community. Thank you for understanding and supporting my journey.
Share this post