AI Tools, Especially Chatbots and Disabled People: Views of Critical Disability Studies Students

AI tools, including chatbots, have become increasingly mainstream and could pose many problems for disabled people and their allies. Such problems could include the lack of accessibility of AI tools for disabled people, including disabled activists and disabled people as digital citizens. Chatbot outputs also may be inaccurate or of low quality due to biased or insufficient training data and might reflect biased and low literacy about the lived reality of disabled people amongst the people involved in setting up the training. Therefore, problems could also include a potential decrease in the public’s literacy about the lived realities of disabled people when AI tools such as chatbots are used without critically analyzing their outputs or using inappropriate prompts for inquiry. Critical disability studies students see themselves as allies of disabled people and want to make a positive difference in their lives. AI tools, including chatbots, are an emerging area that allies of disabled people have to think about because of their increasing impact on the lived reality of disabled people. Using an online survey hosted on a Qualtrics platform, we examined the perspectives of 89 critical disability studies students on the usability and impact of AI tools, including chatbots, on disabled people in areas including the following: accessibility; what knowledge is available and what and whose knowledge is reflected in the output of AI tools and chatbots; the impact of AI tools and chatbots’ output on the literacy of the users about the lived reality of disabled people; and the impact on ability judgment problems disabled people experience, such as ableism and disablism. We performed a thematic analysis of two open-ended questions and frequency (%) analysis of the other questions. Our 89 participants outlined many problems. One set of problems covered accessibility barriers and design-process shortcomings of AI tools, including chatbots. Another set was linked to content-related issues, such as chatbots not reflecting the lived realities of disabled people, the use of biased language and portrayals of disabled people, and the limited usefulness of chatbot-provided information. These issues are not only problematic for disabled people but also for their allies. Participants gave many suggestions regarding the practical impacts of not having data on the lived reality of disabled people, as well as how chatbots could be used, or what has to happen, for them to challenge ableist power structures rather than reinforcing it. All our findings suggest the need for various actions whereby AI ethics, “responsible AI”, and “AI for good” principles could be used to decrease the problems noted, as could be the concepts of AI justice and of ability judgment justice and other ability judgment-linked concepts.