I’ve noticed something strange in the cultural conversation around AI. A lot of the loudest pushback seems to come from people who otherwise champion diversity, equity, neurodiversity, accessibility, and leveling the playing field for those historically excluded from full participation in society. And to be clear, I understand many of the concerns. There are real conversations to be had about labor, art, copyright, surveillance, corporate power, environmental cost, misinformation, and the way giant tech companies love to wrap extraction in the language of progress. I’m not interested in pretending those concerns are imaginary. But there is another side of this conversation that feels almost entirely ignored: for some of us, AI is not a novelty, a productivity hack, a shortcut, or a toy. For some of us, AI is an accessibility tool. Or, to put it in my preferred language, for the neurospicy among us, it can be a ramp.
I am neurodivergent. My mind is fast, strange, layered, and occasionally about as easy to organize as a junk drawer during an earthquake. I can hold a dozen ideas at once, but remembering the next ordinary step can feel like trying to catch smoke with a fork. This is where AI has become genuinely life-changing for me. Conversations with LLMs have helped me write, plan, organize, reflect, emotionally regulate, and move through the world with more clarity. I’ve found them more practically helpful than almost any therapy tool, planner, app, or self-help framework I’ve encountered. Not because AI “thinks for me.” That is the laziest critique. AI helps me think with less friction. It helps turn the cloud into a sentence, the sentence into a plan, the plan into a next step, and the next step into motion. That matters.
My Meta Ray-Bans are another example. I can have music playing when I’m in a busy place to help regulate anxiety. I can be reminded what’s next on the schedule while moving through the day. I can capture a fleeting thought about consciousness, parenting, or what we need from the grocery store before it vanishes into the void, never to be seen again. That is not some dystopian fantasy of becoming less human. That is me becoming more able to function as the human I already am. And this is where the contradiction bothers me. The same people who rightly argue that society should accommodate different bodies, brains, cultures, histories, and ways of being can become deeply suspicious of the very technologies that may help those differences flourish.
We celebrate ramps, captions, glasses, hearing aids, mobility devices, sensory rooms, flexible work, alternative communication, and individualized learning plans. Good. We should. But sometimes the ramp is made of code. Sometimes the accommodation is a language model that helps someone translate their inner weather into something the outside world can understand. Sometimes the assistive device is a wearable that reminds a person what comes next before their executive function collapses under the weight of ordinary life. Sometimes the accessibility tool is a machine that patiently says, “Let’s break this down.” And for those of us who have spent a lifetime masking, compensating, over-performing, forgetting, spiraling, and then feeling shame about all of it, that sentence alone can feel like mercy.
I think part of the issue is that many people confuse critique of systems with critique of tools. You can oppose corporate surveillance without dismissing the disabled person using AI to navigate daily life. You can care about artists without mocking someone who uses an LLM to overcome writing paralysis. You can worry about labor exploitation without treating every individual AI user as morally suspect. You can be skeptical of Meta, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and the whole glittering techno-capitalist circus while still admitting that these tools can be profoundly useful, even liberating, for real people with real needs. Holding both truths is not hypocrisy. It is maturity.
The question should not be, “Is AI good or bad?” That framing is too small. The better question is: who gets helped, who gets harmed, who profits, who is exploited, and who gets to decide? Because from where I sit, AI has the potential to become one of the most significant accessibility technologies of our lifetime. Not because it solves neurodivergence. I do not need to be solved. But because it can help build a bridge between my mind and a world that was not designed for it. I don’t want AI to make everyone the same. I want it to help more people participate as they actually are.
The neurodivergent kid who can tell a brilliant story but can’t organize an essay is not cheating. The adult with ADHD who knows exactly what matters but cannot sequence the five steps required to begin is not cheating. The autistic person who uses AI to rehearse a difficult conversation before having it in real life is not cheating. The anxious parent who needs a calm voice to help sort dinner, schedules, errands, and feelings before bedtime detonates is not cheating. The creative person whose ideas arrive faster than their hands can capture them is not cheating. They are accessing. And I find it strange that a culture increasingly fluent in the language of accommodation can become so rigid when the accommodation arrives in an unfamiliar form.
Maybe part of the discomfort is that AI makes invisible support visible. Many people have always had executive assistants, tutors, editors, therapists, coaches, managers, spouses, parents, institutions, and inherited systems quietly scaffolding their success. But when a neurospicy person uses an LLM to create some of that scaffolding artificially, suddenly we are told the playing field is being corrupted. Maybe the field was never level. Maybe some of us are just now finding tools that reveal how uneven it has always been.
I do not think AI should be accepted uncritically. But I also do not think it should be rejected reflexively by the very people who claim to care about access. For me, AI is not replacing my humanity. It is helping me inhabit it. It is a mirror, a notebook, a planning partner, a translator, a reminder system, a creative collaborator, and occasionally a very patient witness to the absurd carnival inside my head. That may not be everyone’s experience. But it is mine. And I suspect I am far from alone.
So before we flatten the conversation into another round of moral panic, maybe we should leave room for a more complicated truth. AI can be dangerous, exploitative, overhyped, and misused. It can also be a lifeline. Especially for those of us whose minds were never broken, but were constantly asked to operate in systems built for someone else. Sometimes access looks like a ramp. Sometimes it looks like captions. Sometimes it looks like a quiet room. And sometimes, absurdly enough, it looks like a pair of sunglasses, a language model, and a grocery list remembered just in time.