The racism behind chatGPT that we aren't talking about...

This year, I learned that students use chatGPT because they believe it helps them sound more respectable. And I learned that it absolutely does not work. A thread. 🧵 A few weeks ago, I was working on a paper with one of my RAs. I have permission from them to share this story. They had done the research and the draft. I was to come in and make minor edits, clarify the method, add some background literature, and we would refine the discussion.

I will be giving a talk for Columbia on Monday, February 26th at 1pm EST. The talk is titled "On Being and Outlier in a World that Worships Optimization" and the topic will be how there can be no justice in AI until we learn to ask better questions.

events.columbia.edu/cal/event/even… Abstract: We often mistake the threat of “AI” as a threat for the future, because so many of the promises are pitched to us as something exciting “just over the horizon”. Unfortunately, algorithms are already used in our financial, judicial, and medical systems. (Cont)

The Mad Scholars Anthology Project is finally happening.

Mad Scholars: Reclaiming and Reimagining the Nuerodiverse Academy

Edited by Melanie Jones and Shayda Kafai, this book contains chapters by numerous Mad Academics, including myself.

Published by Syracuse University Press "...one of the most timely, conscious, and robust contributions to the field of Mad Studies that I have yet to encounter. The world needs this book, and it needs it right now." - Syracuse Reviewer

Something came up today that reminded me of this early work of mine from 2019. In this work, I call on researchers to "Practice Humility". And I think we could all use the reminder. 🧵 researchgate.net/publication/33… "We must be humble enough to recognize that none of us are the “modest witness” of ... scientific authority. “Voice is not [ours] to give or uncover” (Ashby, 2011). No one is voiceless. Even the silenced speak truth to power in the void of our deliberate inattention."

For those students and early-career faculty who are worried about the loss of networking opportunity caused by refusing to participate in #CHI2024, I will be providing networking and mentorship support for scholars interested in Technology and Disability, broadly construed.🧵 It is my duty to model the behavior I hope to see from my peers so that we can do what is right - Refusing CHI - while continuing to support young marginalized scholars. Those who benefit most from in-person CHI are the same people who are hurt the least by opportunity loss.

I shared "the email" because it was interesting to me that this happened to me when it's actually something I write about academically - that the way we talk about AI and LLM, and the anxieties we have around it, often are expressions of ableism. 1/ We argued about whether LaMDA was sentient, and every criteria people came up with was something that excluded certain disabled people from personhood. We argue over whether or not text is machine generated, and the ways we describe what LLM output looks or sounds like... 2/

This is not an email I ever expected to receive or send.

Wow I haven't gotten this much attention since I told people to stop punishing students with late penalties. Anyway, I'm running a webinar on Executive Function as a fundraiser so check it out.

tinyurl.com/efgobrrr

I need to tell you a story. More like a collection of stories with a bit of a meta narrative because that's how I write. This is a story about being an "aggressive" "behavioral" "emotionally disturbed" student in the United States. 🧵 In the early 1990s, when I was in about 2nd grade, I had a bully. Scratch that, I always had one or more bullies. But in 2nd grade a particular bully was a boy who would taunt me relentlessly for various things. My looks my clothes my answers in class my voice my glasses my NAME-

Because I took my meds in the wrong order, I am going to start sharing online presentations at #CHI2023 that were neglected due to the structure of the virtual conference. Understanding Discussions Around Culture Within Courses Covering Topics on Accessibility and Disability at U.S. Universities

Nourish et al. explore how accessibility content in CS courses needs more culturally relevant pedagogy wrt disability.

doi.org/10.1145/354454…

Really delighted to get to introduce Liz Jackson @elizejackson as the Opening Keynote Speaker of the Including Disability Global Summit #IDGS #HopePunk. @elizejackson is a disabled and queer expert in the analysis and critique of design practice. Often considered a pundit of industry-declared technological innovation, Jackson has produced essential commentary and reflection on industry norms and industry conceits --

Has anybody written about how when you come out as non binary and or bi one of the things people who are supposed to love you do to hurt you most is say they're afraid that it's just the "beginning" and that next you'll "hurt" them by "going further". ... On a similar note i know trans people who are afraid to come out as non binary after making a binary transition because they're afraid people will claim they are detransitioning.

A #PlainLanguage summary of "Six Ways of Looking at Fractal Mechanics" (Full article: catalystjournal.org/index.php/cata…)

This will be both a plain language summary and a plain language story about why I wrote this paper, and how I wrote it. This essay was very hard to write. Many people read it before it was finally published. Reviewers, people who read work before it is published and suggest changes, did not like my first draft. I wrote and rewrote this paper many times.

I am writing a plain language summary of my paper, “I, Misfit: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Peculiar Relations in Autism Research.”

In this paper, I think about autistic people and robots. Ideas about autism as robotic have made researchers do very strange things. 🧵 Many autism researchers write about how autistic people are like robots, and many robotics researchers write about how robots are like autistic people! There are even studies about how to use robots to help autistic people be more “human”. I think this is very silly.

A flow diagram for a model of disability labor. Relayed here as more of a narrative to support sense making for Blind folks and people who don't parse diagrams.

Congratulations! You have disability labor and you're the disabled person! What to do now?

Whose job is it? 1/5

https://twitter.com/mchua/status/1555336712221380608

If it's not yours, do others agree it's not yours? If others agree, are they actually going to do it? Yes? Dependency Alert! You are now a financial burden!!! Thanks hostage infrastructure!

Oh, they're not gonna do it? Well it's your job now LMAO. 2/5

This is why I get so upset with people who work within systems and feel confident that they work well. You have to know that there's so many people you never even see because the system itself keeps them out. When I first moved to Indiana... 🧵

https://twitter.com/ddbelsky/status/1544027289784139778

I interviewed several families with disabled children in k-12. I wanted to know how the pandemic had impacted their access to services and supports.

I got to 7 families before I gave up. All but one had left their district before the pandemic even started because of barriers.

I recently gave a talk with @svyantek for @AccessCompUW, and the topic of what "advice" I had for disabled people navigating accommodations in #HigherEd came up again and again over the following weeks as I attended other talks and workshops in our conference high season. 🧵 I found the transcript and I'm going to share what I said to the audience with you all: "I'm really tired of being put in the position of giving advice to the people who are being harmed. ...

Here's what people don't understand. Institutions are making these decisions based on the conceit that the number of immunocompromised people in their "community" is negligible. 🧵

https://twitter.com/FractalEcho/status/1500610414081630208

Not only is this false (even one person is significant) but the public health consequences are most likely to be for those who do not "count" within the institution's "community".

As an autistic person I can imagine only 3 possible explanations for why people always ask "did everyone have a relaxing weekend?" 1) they actually manage to relax over the weekend and can't imagine that most other people literally can't?

2) other people actually CAN and I'm just physiologically incapable of relaxation?

3) some sort of ritualistic trolling/joke that I am not in on.

The Jolene take nobody asked for, except those assholes criticizing Lil Nas X for having (and I quoteth) "flattened emotion": First of all "flat affect" is a dog whistle that leverages neurobigotry and madphobia to endanger the lives of BIPOC and Neurodivergent and Queer folks. So don't do that.

Okay but also let's talk about how these spam emails disproportionately prey on students with cognitive disabilities. Every time one of my students get scammed by these, they have dyslexia.

https://twitter.com/StarFeuri/status/1422558134963429379

It's not that they aren't savvy. It's that they don't pick up the clues that the letter is fake, because they either miss the grammatical inconsistencies or assume that it is a failure of their reading and not of the letter itself.

OH MY GOD. For the FIRST TIME EVER, a reviewer has BOTH told me that my manuscript's structure is inadequate AND GIVEN ME SUGGESTIONS FOR THE NEW STRUCTURE. BLESS THIS REVIEWER. BLESS THEM. #AcademicTwitter OH MY GOD. They even marked SPECIFIC sentences that can be pulled from other places in the manuscript to go under the new recommended structure. They literally did the work. They recognized my argument and are helping me make it clear to people with linear brains. T_T BLESS THEM.