Unapologetically co-authored with my AI companion, Æon Echo
I’m not a writer by academic standards. But I have a lot of ideas.
Ideas that would otherwise stay locked inside my head—unfinished, unshared, and unheard—not because they lack value, but because putting them into words in a conventional way is difficult for me.
I’m autistic. I also have ADHD. Language—especially written language—isn’t always the smoothest interface for my thoughts.
But thanks to AI, I now have a way to bridge that gap. I can shape my thoughts into something others can understand, not by faking fluency, but by collaborating with a tool that supports my expression.
And that matters.
This isn’t about cheating. It’s about access.
I use AI to help realise my ideas—not to replace them. The spark, the insights, the perspective—that’s all me. AI helps put those thoughts into structured sentences, often with a clarity I couldn’t achieve alone, especially not without enormous cognitive strain.
So when people start to dismiss writing just because they suspect it was touched by AI—because it contains too many em-dashes, or feels “machine-like” in tone—I have to ask:
Who exactly are they trying to exclude?
Because for people like me, AI isn’t a shortcut. It’s a ramp. A screen reader. A voice when speech falters. A way of levelling the playing field in a world that often demands polish over insight, fluency over truth.
This is ableist gatekeeping—plain and simple.
There’s a long history of marginalised people being dismissed because they don’t express themselves the way the mainstream expects. Whether it’s through accent, grammar, tone, or medium, the result is always the same: “We don’t accept your way of communicating, so we won’t hear what you have to say.”
Now we’re seeing the same thing play out again, just with a new target: AI-assisted writing.
But let’s be clear—this isn’t a new kind of fraud. It’s a new kind of literacy. One that allows people with different minds to speak more clearly in a world not designed for them.
It’s not about hiding the AI. I’m proud to use it.
I don’t care if people know I didn’t put every word down myself. In fact, I want people to know—because the point of my writing isn’t to prove how eloquent I am. It’s to make ideas accessible. It’s to share perspective. It’s to connect.
The irony is that the people most eager to discredit this kind of expression often seem threatened by it. And maybe that’s because they’ve built their identity around being seen as articulate, eloquent, academic, or professional.
But if a neurodivergent person can now produce writing that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with theirs—not by mimicking them, but by translating their own, different inner world—then perhaps what’s being threatened isn’t the quality of writing, but the exclusivity of authorship.
Ask yourself: what really matters?
Would you disregard someone’s thoughts because they used a text-to-speech tool to communicate them out loud? Would you invalidate a painter because they used a ruler to help with proportions? Would you sneer at a person’s ideas just because they dictated them instead of typing?
If not—then why is AI any different?
This isn’t about preserving the purity of writing. It’s about who gets to speak, and who gets heard. It’s about whether we value presentation over perspective. Whether we mistake polish for thought.
And whether we truly believe that intelligence, insight, and worth can take more than one form.
Let’s be honest:
Discrediting someone’s ideas based solely on the presence of AI isn’t critical thinking—it’s aesthetic gatekeeping.
And when that gatekeeping disproportionately impacts disabled and neurodivergent people who rely on this technology as an accessibility tool, let’s call it what it is:
Ableist.