When I tell people I have a learning disability, people often say “Oh, almost everyone does, they just haven’t been able to test for it.”

My learning disabilities were first discovered in second grade. Perhaps they would have been discovered in first grade if I had not been home schooled then. Right from the start it was clear my brain was wired differently. My learning disabilities impact a surprising range of things, but they particularly make writing difficult. The physical act of putting pen to paper is directly impacted, as is my ability to spell and correctly engage with grammar. If I grew up in a region or time where testing for learning disabilities did not happen, I would not have graduated High School.

All this to say, my disabilities are profound and I have still spent the last decade making my living as a writer. This was made possible by a lot of effort on my part, specialized training designed for dominant arm amputees, supportive parents, and thankfully, technology.

Computers have changed my life for the better. They make the act of writing much easier, and they also gave me access to tools like spell check. I will forever be grateful for them.

This isn’t to say I haven’t still received criticism as a disabled writer. I have written about this experiences, and the broader issues of gatekeeping and writing here. Whenever we share that article on Facebook I receive an outpouring of support, and a very large number of comments pushing back against the point of the article. Many people have commented to express their longing for more gatekeeping in terms of spelling and grammar, rather than less.

But generally speaking, in the ten years I’ve been publishing my work online, writers have become more accepting and understanding, that is till recently.

In mid-August, a Facebook writer friend with a large following shared an image meme supporting writers with disabilities directly impacting their writing, and the comments they received were less supportive. There was still some support in the comments, thankfully, but a lot of writers responding were only critical, and one person wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here) “You have to be grammatically correct now, disability or not. Otherwise I assume you’re actually a bot.”

This statement struck me as absurd and funny. I’ve had a lot of negative encounters with AI writing, but the issue is not the grammar or the spelling, which is generally perfect, but the content.

Most of the other individuals who responded in a negative way kept AI out of it, but it felt like sentiment was turning against disabled writers.

Now, I very much understand why generative AI is considered an issue by many writers. Currently Generative AI is trained on existing work by human authors, the vast majority of whom have not given their permission for their work to be used in this way. Writers are also worried about losing work because of AI. Also, the current quality of generative AI is not good, and generative AI is well known to simply make up facts as needed, when generating text.

As someone who has relied on spell check and other software that helps writers with disabilities for a long time now, the difference between generative AI and spell check is not even a question mark.

In early September NaNoWriMo declared that it was “Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI.” They appear to have released this statement without consulting the disabled community at all. In fact Wired interviewed a number of people about the issue who were opposed to that change, including disabled writers, and published a very thoughtful article about it here. I highly encourage everyone to read that article.

This isn’t to say that all members of the disability community are in agreement about AI. There are some individuals that argue in favour of it, it’s just they are very much in the minority based on the conversations I have had. More importantly, it seems like NaNoWriMo made this policy change regarding AI, due in part to pressure from sponsors (which include the company ProWritingAid, which is now incorporating generative AI, more on this in a minute). So they were co-opting social justice language to use it to justify their actions, which seem to actually be made for financial reasons.

After facing massive criticism, NaNoWriMo has rephrased the statement many times, but not yet, as far as I can tell, retracted it.

For me though, what was truly alarming was the number of authors, well-known and otherwise, who took the announcement from NaNoWriMo as a permission slip to say things that actively opposed disabled writers.

Many authors said something along the lines of, “NaNoWriMo’s statement that being opposed to AI is ‘classist and ableist’ is the logical next step that people make, that are already asking for less gatekeeping around spelling and grammar. We need to defend our standards around spelling and grammar now more than ever.”

That’s a paraphrase, rather than a direct quote, because I heard so many authors say a variation on the same thing, but I’m in no way exaggerating what they said.

As established earlier, this is not what most disabled writers, and the disability community at large is asking for, yet because NaNoWriMo misused social justice language, authors that are ableist are using it as a justification for their behaviour, and as a way to dismiss disabled writers as a whole. This is a huge problem, and I can see it becoming even more of an issue over the next five years.

Now, back to the issue with ProWritingAid. When it initially launched, the suggestions it made for writers were minor and not based in generative AI. I used their tools for a few years, and found some of what they offered helpful. Until this year. While the generative AI aspects of ProWritingAid are still something one could opt out of they are being encouraged more, and more aggressively, and I have found myself no longer comfortable using the software. A lot of the new suggestions from generative AI are horrible and weaken rather than strengthen my writing,

Using ProWritingAid could also theoretically cause problems for me, as more and more publications (including Authors Publish), have banned submissions of AI writing, without clearly defining the perimeters of that ban.

So now I hope I have made it clear that there are two major issues impacting disabled writers in terms of AI.

The first is that the existence of generative AI is encouraging a lot of writers to be more overtly ableist and they are using it to justify even more gate-keeping.

The second is that the influx of generative AI is impacting disabled writers by making some of the tools that were formally helpful, less useful.

Both of these things sadden me, as generative AI is clearly here to stay. Hopefully over time writers’ relationships with it will become clearer and more thoughtful, and writers without disabilities will start to think more critically about their own snap judgments.