Smart for some, a crutch for others: The double standard in how AI use is judged

A disabled person with chronic illness, ADHD, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome wrote on Reddit last October that AI had changed their daily life, helping organise information for doctor appointments and pursue creative work during severe fatigue when no other support was available.

“AI is the one thing I have that does not make me feel limited by my disabilities,” they wrote in r/The10thDentist.

The post drew hundreds of responses, highlighting something rarely acknowledged: disabled people are not unified on AI, and the conversation is more complicated than the debate suggests.

Reddit discussions in 2025 and 2026 showed a pattern: when able-bodied
professionals adopt AI, it is called
‘innovative’ and ‘efficient’. When disabled people adopt it, questions arise about authenticity and agency.

The technology is identical. The assumption about the user changes.

A thread in r/aiwars from March 2026 challenged the simple narrative. Toby_Magure, a career illustrator with tardive dyskinesia, described using AI tools to work despite losing fine motor control. “My hands may not be able to put a line on a canvas correctly, but I know what that line is meant to represent, why it is there, and how it is weighted,” they wrote. “Exactly how does that make it any less my line?”

A discussion in r/antiai in May 2026 captured the other side. A deaf user described AI-generated captions becoming less accurate and an AI-powered medical system wrongly flagging minor health concerns as emergencies, blocking non-urgent requests.

Penn State researchers found in 2023 that public AI models assigned more negative scores to statements about people with disabilities than to comparison groups. Every model showed significant bias. Words such as ‘blind’ were treated as negative by default. The researchers called this ‘automated ableism’.

A Virginia Tech study in October 2024, analysing 61 neurodivergent Reddit communities, found LLM responses often calibrated for neurotypical users, producing outputs that felt alienating. The Disability, Bias, and AI report from AI Now and NYU in 2019 argued that claims of machine objectivity erase the agency of those most likely to be misclassified by these systems.

When disability becomes content

In May 2025, CBS News found over 30 AI-generated accounts impersonating people with Down syndrome across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Alex Bolden, who has Down syndrome and works for the National Down Syndrome Society, said: “It is not right to steal our stories just to get attention online.”

In February 2026, BBC News documented AI-generated profiles sexualising disabled women on Instagram, some with hundreds of thousands of followers. Kamran Mallick, chief executive of Disability Rights UK, said: “What we have here is technology weaponised to strip disabled people of their agency and dignity, turning our lived experiences into digital caricatures for the profit of others.”

In the same news item, Alison Kerry, head of communications at disability charity Scope, said: “These AI images do not appear from nowhere. They are built from real disabled people’s images, often without consent.”

Amy Gaeta of the University of Cambridge, who researches AI and disability, noted: “Sometimes, without my prompting or intent, hypersexualised images of disabled people will be generated. This shows a bias in the datasets these tools are trained on.”

The mandate and the gap

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 makes digital accessibility mandatory in India, requiring service providers to make their products equally available to all, including people with disabilities. If applied to AI, most disabled people globally report that AI has made them independent for the first time, enabling them to work without human help. Yet, as research shows, AI has created new hurdles for some, shutting them out of what could be a life-changing technology.

Disabled people using AI to work, communicate, and navigate a world not designed for them are not demonstrating dependency. If the purpose of technology is to solve challenges and improve lives, AI does that for people with disabilities as much as for people without.

Yet the same technology has drawn a wedge within the disability community, including some and excluding others, leaving many with mixed feelings about a tool that could transform their lives.

What most persons with disabilities find hardest to bear is not AI’s limitations. It is being pulled into arguments about AI by people who do not understand their conditions, using them as examples to support or oppose AI, without asking or listening. This is a form of erasure the disability community has endured long before AI. They deserve better than to be evidence in a debate about something else.

For India, where the RPwD Act sets the legal standard for digital accessibility, this is not a distant debate. AI systems built and deployed here carry the same biases unless developers and researchers choose to build differently. That means including disabled users in design from the start and auditing models for language bias. A disabled professional using AI is not a curiosity or cause—they are a user, like everyone else.  DHNS