Critical AI Studies as it currently stands is primarily focused on questioned related to data privacy, governmentality, labor displacement and automation, bias and racism within the algorithms, decoloniality, datafication and surveillance, ethical implementation. etc. There is some initial work on AI and disability studies from the standpoint of medical uses, but much less so examining the impact of the technology on narrative and representation.
There is, however, much interest about AI in our organization. This past year (20023), the MLA sponsored a closed-door workshop on “Writing and AI,” which one of the members of this proposed panel attended (Eduardo Ledesma), and which generated productive discussion on a variety of subjects, including examining the many ways in which the technology will impact our profession at-large. Among the topics discussed, the question of Disability Culture and AI was brought up as an area that necessitated research by MLA members. Additional discussions within the “Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession” (to which the convener of this panel, Ledesma, also belongs) also evinced a strong support for the need for a panel such as this one. The number of calls for papers for next year’s conference that involve some question related to AI provide further proof that this panel will be well attended and will generate work that can assist in the diversification of Critical AI Studies.
To promote a lengthy and productive discussion, we selected three panelists who will be limited to 15-minute papers, all differently abled and representing a wide-range of scholarly concerns within Disability Studies. Ledesma will act as both panelist and moderator/discussant, posing questions to other panelists and audience at the end of the session. Our first paper will be “Aesthetic Familiarity: When Autistic Readers Find Familiarity in Fiction” by Sean A. Yeager (Ohio State), beginning the discussion by examining the intersection between neurodivergence and AI as represented in various narratives. Yeager focuses on the “autisticness” of representations of artificial intelligence in fiction and builds on the work of other neurodivergent-authored scholarship on the subject.
Our second panelist, Elizabeth Wayson (University of Georgia) will present “Creative Companions: Examining the Relationship between Generative AI Models and Liberatory Access in Writing Pedagogy.” She examines using generative AI as an inclusive writing pedagogical tool for student writers who identify as disabled. Wayson examines how generative AI models such as ChatGPT encourage interdependency and liberatory access. She studies how AI alleviates writing anxiety and dispels the notion of writing as a solo act, showing how AI can make writing more approachable, enjoyable, and meaningful for not just student writers with disabilities but all student writers.
The formal part of the session ends with a paper by Ledesma (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), titled “AI and the Blind Gaze: Translating Blind Subjectivity into AI-generated Cinema in The Blind Canvas Project (2023).” He examines how blind filmmaker Ben Fox’s recent video, The Blind Canvas Project (2023), uses Generative-AI rendered images to represent auto-biographical narratives by various blind and visually impaired artists. In the process, Fox and his subjects create works that interrogate the primacy of vision itself, as well as the interplay between sound, image and hapticity. Just as the videos in the project seek to translate words into images (and vice versa), they also aim to “represent” the subjectivity and experience of blindness in order to make it intelligible for a seeing audience.
Collectively, these papers begin to lay out some of the main lines of inquiry into AIs impact on disability narratives and discourses. Beyond our panel’s timely focus on disability studies and AI, it is worth noting that it also aligns specifically with the Presidential theme of “visibility,” in particular, the subtopic of “visibility and disability studies.” While Yeager’s paper prominently “makes visible” the often-neglected question of neurodivergence and its representation, Wayson brings to our attention the challenges of those with psychological and other disabilities when practicing the craft of writing, and Ledesma actually speaks about vision, visual impairment and the way it is portrayed in film and video by blind creators.