The Impact of the Use of Artificial Intelligence on People with Disabilities
The New York City Bar Association’s Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies has released a report highlighting the harmful effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on people with disabilities, and the harm likely to occur for them in the future.
Research studies and focus groups have found that AI-generated text and images often misrepresent the experiences of people with disabilities and reinforce harmful stereotypes. These generated materials overrepresent physical disabilities like wheelchair use while ignoring more diverse experiences of neurodivergence, involving sensory, cognitive, and mental health conditions. Stories about people with disabilities generated by large language models (LLMs) have also exhibited bias against disability-related terms, presenting the experience as negative.
AI-generated responses have been found to provide inaccurate information to user prompts, which misleads people with disabilities who rely on the responses to summarize inaccessible content and other resources. AI systems are only as equitable as the data and design choices that shape them: “When AI tools are built and trained without the intentional inclusion of disability-centered data or perspectives, they systematically exclude, misrepresent, or fail to accommodate the very users who could benefit from them most,” states the report.
The Task Force maintains that a disability-inclusive AI ecosystem requires sustained collaboration among policymakers, industry, and the disability community. In response to these challenges, the report proposes ten recommendations for the development and implementation of AI systems, including increased inclusion of people with disabilities in designing new tools, mandating accessibility data inclusion in AI training sets, and continuous review by policymakers of anti-discrimination frameworks for AI.
Read the full report here: https://bit.ly/3FURuAi
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