Plain language is an important part of making things accessible for disabled people. Plain language works because disabled people are part of writing it. Disabled people use our lived experience to make sure plain language is accessible. ASAN wrote a statement to tell people we do not need artificial intelligence to do this work when we know disabled people do it best. We tested artificial intelligence programs by telling them to write in plain language, and they made big mistakes that prove they should not be used to make writing accessible. 

Artificial intelligence is when a computer program does things that normally need to be done by humans. We call artificial intelligence “AI” for short. There are lots of different kinds of AI. AI has become a popular topic recently. When people talk about AI today, they usually mean generative AI. Generative AI is a specific kind of AI. Generative AI can use data to make new things. Generative AI might seem like a fun and helpful new idea. But there are a lot of problems with generative AI. These problems get even bigger when people use generative AI to write in plain language. 

Generative AI changes what things mean. It focuses on words, not what they mean. That means what it makes is not accessible or plain language. As an experiment, staff at ASAN took things we had written and asked a generative AI to lower the reading level. The text we put in was about how autistic people deserve rights. The AI added new ideas that were not in the text we wrote. The AI added sentences about how some autistic people have very rare and amazing talents. This is not something that ASAN would say. We believe autistic people deserve rights even if we don’t have amazing talents.

You can read the full statement here. We list the reasons why people should not use generative AI to write in plain language. Plain language is an important part of making things accessible for people with disabilities. Using generative AI makes “plain language” that is not actually accessible. Generative AI has no place in plain language. We hope anyone who writes in plain language will not use generative AI.

Autistic Self Advocacy Network

PO Box 66122
Washington, DC 20035

 

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