I wouldn’t say I have been following with interest so much as bemusement the Nanowrimo conflagration around whether they should allow AI or not, and that critiquing it is classist and ableist. I did listen to the 404 Media podcast about it yesterday. Much of the thinking around all of this feels very alien to me, but if people feel it’s important to pursue, more power to them. I’ve never nanowrimoed, so I don’t have a horse in that race really.

Anyway, here is the Willison quote, transcribed from a recent podcast he appeared on. He doesn’t frame this in the context of ableism, but it seems thematically compatible:

For people who don’t speak English or have English as a second language, this stuff is incredible.

We live in a society where having really good spoken and written English puts you at a huge advantage.

The street light outside your house is broken and you need to write a letter to the council to get it fixed? That used to be a significant barrier.

It’s not anymore. ChatGPT will write a formal letter to the council complaining about a broken street light that is absolutely flawless.

And you can prompt it in any language. I’m so excited about that.

I’ve been reflecting on this lately as someone who does not identify as disabled, but who has spent the last 13 years acclimating as an immigrant to a culture whose language I was not raised in. Depending on your legal status, and many other factors outside your control (like race, ethnicity, country of origin, etc.), the experience of being an immigrant parallels in some respect that of people who are physically disabled.

Obviously the scale of experience is different for people who are physically disabled and my aim is not to diminish that, but perhaps the immigrant experience is something like being socially/culturally/politically disabled. Let me explain…

In some cases you lack legal rights shared by those standing around you in a crowd. If you’re still learning the language of the new country, you may lack the ability to understand important information that affects you personally, like legal or medical information (for example, there is a fight right now in Quebec over whether Anglophones should be allowed to receive medical care in English; that we’re even having such a stupid debate in an officially bi-lingual country committed to universal health care is fucking mind-bogglingly infuriating).

You are likely to be unable to easily do, let alone even be considered for many categories of work, which pushes you into low-paying jobs, etc. (For example, I worked for a while at a slaughterhouse cutting heads and feet off chicken carcasses, and dipping dead geese in wax to make it easier to pull of their feathers, because it’s what was available to me; ironically, it was one of the best run family businesses and best agricultural operation I’ve seen – and I traveled and worked in that domaina lot). I could go on and on, but the disadvantages are many. And many of them take years and many other opportunities aligning to be able to effectively overcome them. Others of them, as an immigrant, you just sort of accept you will never probably overcome them – like an ex-president suggesting you eat dogs during a national debate. I kid though, most of them are much more small mundane defeats that pile up over time until you’re just exhausted by them.

So yes, I completely a thousand billion percent agree with Willison above, that one of the legitimate “super-powers” that AI gives us is linguistic proficiency. And as someone living in a foreign culture and language, this equalizes certain categories of disadvantage or deficiencies I might otherwise have. It is an extremely powerful and profound social leveler.

Willison above uses the example of requesting a fix for a broken streetlight in English, for someone whom English is not their first language. I’m a big complainer, so I’ve definitely been using it for things of that nature, requests to government agencies, queries to French media, things like that. And rather than having to stumble through getting my thoughts out poorly in a long email with multiple components, and spending like five days on it, now I can just pop over to ChatGPT. And poof! Might not be perfect results (as a non-native French speaker, it’s difficult for me to tell), but they are extremely workable. Plus, the system helps me figure out who to send it to, what laws may be applicable (dicey territory, but gives you leads to check on yourself), and so on.

So, using AI in this sense gives me maybe not social fluency, but at least a higher degree of cultural proficiency, and ready access to political knowledge, especially where this intersects with my rights as a “user” of government services. This is all information which would otherwise be largely opaque and inaccessible to me.

I’ve been thinking also about, isn’t it likely, as these tools improve, and their social acceptance gets ironed out over time, that *not* having access to them will be seen as classist and even disabling? What will happen when all your peers have, for example, Elon Musk’s X chip in their skull? Admittedly, accepting Palmer Eldritch, erm I mean Elon Musk as your lord and techno-savior who you get to pay rent to inside your brain could be persuasively argued to be itself disabling. But I’m sure there will be those who say the opposite…

I’ve been imagining a future scenario where after widespread AI adoption/bio-integration, someone arrested for violating the Politeness Protocols, for example, could be read their rights:

“If you cannot afford an AI, one will be provided for you at a very modest compound interest rate…”

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