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It seems that wider society is just starting to realize that the pedestal that we have put many tech bros on is maybe not the most strategic or healthy. And that perhaps we should talk about this a bit.

I’m glad y’all are here, but you’re also late to the party, and here’s how.

I grew up with two siblings, one of whom died in an untimely manner in 2014 (I have written publicly about this but will not be linking it here). The other is alive and very much a tech bro, and we are extraordinarily estranged.

As far as I am concerned, the estrangement is very much a relief and extremely necessary. It is, as much as anything in this situation can be, my choice. And also it will likely get worse before it gets better — a fact which I have accepted, and for which I am preparing as much as I can.

Now on to societal tech bros, including many behind the current AI BOOM (and that’s BOOM as in “oh shit we blew something up we didn’t intend to,” not BOOM as in productivity). They’ve been vested with enormous power, but more so, adulation. And I think you underestimate just how much that adulation means to them: It means everything, more than money (though that means a great deal too); more than the process of building stuff; more than keggers. More than, idk, girls.

And they are committed to continuing to get that adulation. By whatever means necessary.

You can keep winking at them and saying, “Let’s just feed them to get what we want; they don’t mean what they say; they don’t mean what they do, when it doesn’t match what they say; man, they’re socially awkward so let’s not put too much stock in what they say or do, period.” I really don’t care what your rationalizations are, at the end of the day. Nor do they.

But in terms of understanding just how entangled you are and what your options are, you must understand that the adulation which you have afforded them over the past decades is baked in at this point. You couldn’t withdraw it wholesale if you wanted to. You are programmed to give it in ways that can’t easily be undone, just as much as they are programmed to receive and feed on it.

So does that mean your only option is some other form of extrication? Of estrangement? No, not necessarily. Social dynamics are different than family ones (much as toxic social ones can fuel family dysfunction like nobody’s business). You do have other options for autonomy, for containing the damage, and for control.

But first you must recognize how entangled you are, and where the adulation you are providing comes from — what you get from giving it, not just how they receive it on their end. How all of this means that the whole situation is likely to deteriorate first before it can get better; but it can get better in the longer term.

This doesn’t mean that you should give into prognostications of doom, just that should take stock of the situation now, all of it, including what you have invested to keep it going.

Because you have invested. A lot. And that investment has likely come to the fore in your mind in some way just in the minutes it took you to read this.

Good. And know that I deliberately started it with hints at my own family drama before putting the lid on that, while continuing to reference it obliquely. Because as much as my situation is likely to deteriorate further, I am also engaged in actively containing exactly how bad it can get.

I want to thrive too, but it may take a generation or more to undo some of the worst things that have been baked in. And I am okay with that. It is not about me exactly or what I individually manage to accomplish before I am gone.

When my daughter was being assessed for ASD, the doctor very briefly let her mask slip, but it was in a good way which let me know how fortunate I was to have her assessed when and how I did. 

Basically, my daughter, then two-and-a-bit years old, walked up to the laptop (it was a virtual assessment, thanks Covid) and said a sentence, which had, like, a lot of grammar and words and stuff. I mean, to me it was just a thing that my kid did, but Much Words, Very Grammar was the impression I got from the doctor, who was sitting and watching us intently from the other side of the screen. 

For a moment, the doctor almost seemed as if she was going to go down the well-trodden, “Can a child who does THIS much grammar and THAT many words ACTUALLY BE AUTISTIC?” path. She asked me my thoughts about the sentence my child had just uttered, and I confirmed it was about one of her current topics of intense focus — “Yeah, um, she really likes socks” — and so, yeah, she was gonna talk about it. Did she want to know anything else about socks? 

The doctor then seemed to compose herself and recited, almost as if to remind herself, “Well, girls can present differently.” It was as if she was recalibrating in the face of recent data indicating that past ASD assessment practices have been pretty gender biased (Cook et al., 2024; Tien et al., 2025), due to the fact that they were developed and normed on samples where girls were either underrepresented or excluded entirely (Gould, 2017). But this doctor had obviously recently taken a training along the lines of “How To Be Less Sexist In Your ASD Assessments” and it was fresh in her brain.

Then the doctor proceeded to do a pretty thorough, non-biased, assessment. I mean, there were still plenty of parts of it that I found annoying, but at least they weren’t judging my child by an unfair sexist standard. And my child got diagnosed and thereby got supports, which was a process that was also aggravating at times but fundamentally door-opening and thus GOOD. 

How often do you recalibrate in your day-to-day life? It can be awkward and uncomfortable since it often means letting your mask slip at least a little, which for some is a big deal. Speaking of MDs, I have known some for whom it is a huge deal. Any crack in their perceived authority is a major problem. So I give that doctor credit for what she she did.

It was also neat that I got to see it in real time, and I became quite grateful. I knew how easy it would have been for us to get a doctor who would have brushed us off and set off a years-long battle for appropriate identification and supports, a path I have watched other parents go down only too often. And to be clear, it is not a path that you can go down only if you have a girl — by no means! But you are more likely to go down it in certain ways that correlate to how autistic girls have historically been missed, ignored, and even denied, a la “girls don’t have autism, it’s a boy thing.” 

The point is, that doctor had updated her knowledge, as she considered such updating to be part of her professional obligation. And while her outdated, incorrect knowledge still held some sway, especially in her reflexive responses, she was committed to the retraining she had done, the re- and unlearning, the adjusting. And that matters.

I miss that fortunate feeling now, for it meant advancement, progress, and accountability. It meant being serious about equity and righting past wrongs, for the sake of the humans and human lives at stake. I mentioned professional ethics previously — that doctor had some, and she took them seriously in her professional practice.

 I think if we ever get AI to work for us, we will need to be similarly conscious about this recalibration process and how it is tracked, verified, and communicated. This has been studied in terms that focus on whether users will continue trusting (and thus using) AI products which make mistakes. As of 2022, when AI voice assistants would mess up, there were identified “good” ways and “bad” ways they could respond: “agents that openly accepted the blame and apologized sincerely for mistakes were thought to be more intelligent, likeable, and effective… than agents that shifted the blame to others” (Mahmood et al, 2022, p. 1). 

But note here that we are talking about blame, not redress or restitution in the form of an appreciable, trackable change in future practice. I am grateful my daughter was not assessed according to medical sexism, but I don’t think I would have blamed that doctor if she had applied a sexist standard and thus missed the chance to accurately diagnose her at that point in time. I would have been frustrated, certainly, and that frustration would have come out of a preemptive exhaustion at the thought that I was going to have to go through the whole assessment process again, but on a harder setting and likely at a higher monetary cost to me (Canadian healthcare had come through for us on the first round, and I was out nothing out of pocket).  Nonetheless, blame is not the right word; neither is a ritualistic, performative process like sincere apologizing (and what is “sincere” for an AI agent, anyway?)

Mahmood et al. went on to discuss agents potentially offering compensation for mistakes, but restitution and compensation are also two different things; when you want a thing which was previously harmful to be and do better in the light of updated knowledge, you want a transformation and the knowledge that future people in your situation won’t suffer as you have. 

These are admittedly higher stakes than an agent which orders you takeout, but things have also progressed on this front since 2022; yet the discourse around how and whether AI agents actually meaningfully recalibrate in light of updated, more equitable, more correct professional bodies of knowledge… kind of hasn’t. And yet we are insistent on outsourcing ever more professional responsibilities to them, with limited (and opaque) lip service to human oversight. In fact, promises about such oversight now are increasingly part of exaggerations and projections about the capabilities of AI systems themselves. It’s a futurism that is devoid of a falsifiable definition of what “human-in-the-loop” actually means; it means whatever it is required to mean (Chang, 2024).

Mahmood et al. noted that part of the struggle with getting people to “forgive” agents for missteps had to do with how “people’s expectations are misled by the futuristic portrayal of AI capabilities” (p. 1). When you have wildly inaccurate futuristic expectations for what the AI agent can do, you are not going to “forgive” as easily when the agent doesn’t meet those inflated expectations.

Sadly this is due to futurist propaganda, not accidentally inflated imaginings and desires on the part of the humans being encouraged or directed to put their trust in these agents. Those expectations themselves need a deliberate recalibration, as deliberate as that doctor was when she stopped herself in her tracks and did that about-face.

But that is not likely to happen, for when we are miscalibrated and uninformed, we are far more lucrative revenue sources, more dependable users, and more pliant subjects. 

References

Chang, R. (2024). Human in the Loop!. In Edmonds, D. (Ed.), AI Morality (pp. 222-234.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198876434.001.0001

Cook, J., Hull, L., & Mandy, W. (2024). Improving diagnostic procedures in autism for girls and women: A narrative review. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 505-514.

Gould, J. (2017). Towards understanding the under-recognition of girls and women on the autism spectrum. Autism, 21(6), 703-705.

Mahmood, A., Fung, J. W., Won, I., & Huang, C. M. (2022, April). Owning mistakes sincerely: Strategies for mitigating AI errors. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-11).

Tien, I., Pearson, A., Sozeri, S., & Seers, K. (2025). “Only Boys Can be Autistic”: A Qualitative Exploration of Gender Stereotype and Socialization on the Diagnostic Journey. Autism in Adulthood.

Some of my blog posts here might read like a giant shrug. AI might or might not get subtext — it’s complicated. It has a spiky profile a la lots of autistic humans, but it WON’T go get psychoeducational testing for some reason (which, yes, I get is not an actual thing for AI)… so boo. On the other hand, it would be REALLY great if it would get its reference lists in order so I could respond to it properly. Insert pretend dog journal reference.

The thing is, we are in a moment of hype where we don’t know a lot of what this new blob of constantly-changing technologies that are being called “AI” can and can’t do. And to a large extent, we are not meant to know that. I do not have access to proprietary industry data or companies’ marketing or comms strategies. All I know is what I see before me and the patterns I have stored in my brain from decades of living on this planet and being autistic.

My young child did a thing the other night, and my (very autistic-friendly) friends and family were roundly split on What It Meant… aside from being adorable, I mean, which they all agreed on. Here it was:

Child, after dinner: Do we have Twix?
Me: I can’t remember. Maybe.
Child: *goes to kitchen, sniffs* HEY! What’s that smell? I think I smell Twix!

We then proceeded to establish through sight and touch that Twix was, in fact, present in our kitchen, though she ultimately chose a different candy for her after-dinner treat (she wanted to establish the existence of Twix, not immediately consume it).

Anyway, what my friends were split on was Whether She Actually Smelled The Twix. I was on the side of no, probably not, actually, BUT it was really cute and sometimes she likes to pretend her nose is like a dog’s, which led me to an elaborate mental scenario where you train dogs to sniff out Twix for you because people are hiding them and like, you need them immediately or something. Okay but the point is, no heightened senses here, just a kid being cute and dramatic to show that she knows that you have the thing she wants¹.

Other friends, meanwhile, were like, oh hey, yay heightened autistic senses! Because, yeah, autistics do sometimes have keen senses in ways that non-autistics can find quite surprising. And… I would not put that past my child actually. I just didn’t think it was the most likely possibility, all things considered.

But I didn’t really push back on my friends who did or argue with them or try to establish a definitive answer to the question of Whether She Actually Smelled The Twix. I thought that it was a worthwhile possibility to consider — does she have a smell map of our kitchen that she isn’t telling me about, and does that smell map have a special chocolate-caramel-biscuit category? Her sensory sensitivities can align with mine and then not align in interesting ways, so, it’s certainly possible! On the other hand, her deciding to pretend that she’s a dog in terms of ocular capacities is equally possible, because, well, she’s six.

Moreover, while my friends are largely quite chill in that they have autistic friends, family, or acquaintances whom they don’t segment like nobody’s business, NOT everybody is like that. There are plenty of places in our world where you have a surprising “useful” sensory, or other, capability, and as soon as you let on about it — goodbye privacy; goodbye childhood. You’re labeled a savant, is what I’m saying, and ain’t no coming back from that. Your BEST hope is to be wrung like a washcloth until all the impressive-usefulness is squeezed out of you, and then flung aside. (Worst is to be wrung out and then left there to see if you will somehow rehydrate, and when that doesn’t happen because all the water on the planet is being sold for $100 a bottle now, you are discarded entirely.)

So the point is, you can be Schrödinger’s Cat in terms of Whether You Actually Smell The Twix. But unlike that cat, we can’t just open the box and observe you and thereby force you into one state or the other. We are prohibited from opening the box, or it’s entirely too well-sealed in the first place.

Image source

Image adapted from from Dhatfield, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I am interested in asking why we can’t open the box, and thinking about who is keeping us from doing so and why they might be doing that, not speculating about what is Actually In The Box (because that is simply not useful at this point; it’s both and neither). Furthermore, since in this scenario uniquely, my own thoughts and ideas are actually feeding and thereby creating whatever is in the box — alive, dead, Twix-smelling, whatever — I am actually pretty interested in the patterns of those thoughts, and how they are and aren’t changing as a result of this whole situation. If I am co-creating whatever is in the box, I damn well want to be aware of my own part in that co-creation.

There was a time in my life when I would have been entirely intimidated by the thought that my child, or any other close relative of mine, had such a keen sensitivity as to smell Twix in a kitchen when I could not. I would have thought deeply about what it meant for me to be related to such a person, and whether this implicated some of my own odd sensory capabilities and sensitivities in any way. I would have been embarrassed and awed by it; I would have wanted to simultaneously cleanse my kitchen of any Twix and stock it with so much Twix you wouldn’t have room for anything I could actually smell, with my comparatively puny ocular faculties.

And, yes, I would have treated that Twix-smelling person pretty terribly, ultimately, failing at the basic job of treating them as a human. I would have sought to commodify them and thereby mollify any implication that it was I who should be displayed, should be commodified.

I realize you are probably tired of hearing the abilities, or lack thereof, of AI compared to Twix and alive-but-dead cats. I am too. But the hype and lies are only going to ramp up from here on out. And the cat in that box, which we are forbidden to open, will continue to be both alive and dead.

Don’t let them distract you by which one it “actually is.” And remember that you are and always will be a key part of what it keeping it alive, if it is alive — and that which has killed it, if it is dead.

1. You might ask, “But why don’t you just ask her whether or not she actually smelled the Twix?” and I must inform you, dear reader, that that is not possible for reasons that have to do with how I do and don’t, and can and can’t, meaningfully communicate with my autistic child. Yes, she uses mouth words, but no, she does not use all mouth words in all ways that you might want or expect her to. That being said… she is learning to share, including Twix. ↩︎

AI varies remarkably in its ability to recognize and correctly identify subtext. And the thing is… I get it. I’m autistic and definitely do not have consistent abilities in this department either. 

So after Claude and its brethren finally go and get some psychoeducational testing and are actually open with us about the results, I would like to suggest they do some unpacking around when they get subtext, when they don’t, and what it means for, like, all the other things. 

Because the thing is, subtext ALSO varies remarkably among those who traffic in it. It is not just one thing, and it is NOT just used in one way. Some subtext is of pretty negligible impact ultimately, and you, as the subtext-non-getter, can kind of just let it wash over you. Sure, there are others around you to whom it is quite important. They can feel that it is important, and you can respect that. You can even try to be respectful of some of their various rituals around it! But at the end of the day – you don’t quite believe in that, and that is okay too. It’s a subtext religion, and we live in a pluralistic society. Not everyone has to be on the same page, or any page at all. 

On the other hand, other subtext is actually pretty critical and encodes information that you, the subtext-non-getter, do actually want to know sooner rather than later. As an example of this fact, let’s take an extraordinarily human example, that of the birth of my child and crucial information about feeding her so she wouldn’t starve in her first days of life. Yup, it’s personal. It’s also an area where misinformation – if a (largely) pre-AI form of it – ran rampant, and the entrenchment of power around that misinformation caused actual danger and harm.

So to set the stage, I 1) gave birth at 35 weeks, for reasons that are not entirely clear; 2) wanted to breastfeed at least in part at the beginning of my baby’s life, if possible; and 3) very much needed information about this to figure things out in a balanced way, for baby and also for me. And to further set the stage, my beliefs about infant/newborn feeding, then and now, were basically “breast is best, all things being equal – but sometimes all things aren’t equal, and formula is OK too.” In a similar vein, I had wanted to give birth in a certain way, if possible; but that hadn’t ultimately been possible, and the surgical intervention that had happened instead had, in fact, saved my life. So I was emphatically not in the thrall of what was “natural.” I liked modern inventions like life-saving surgery and formula, yet I also knew that my body could do some neat stuff and wanted to take advantage of that if possible. Basically.

(Some people would call this approach “fed is best,” but I didn’t traffic in those circles or know that slogan. And as in many places where subtext runs rampant, it’s kind of all about the slogans that you know at the time that you need to know the thing – or rather, the ones you don’t. So, a “fed-is-best-er” I was not. Not at the time. That’s just a fact.)

Now for further scene-setting. Though I gave birth early, my child did not have to go to the NICU, by some stroke of luck – she is with me, by my bedside, and both of us are being monitored, in a lovely Toronto hospital that is among the best for such care. Because she is beside me, feeding her also falls on me, although nurses are around and “highly trained in breastfeeding assistance.” I ask for such assistance, and they comply, jostling my arms and the baby and my chest. And I feel hugely rising anxiety, on my part and baby’s. Something isn’t right. 

A breastfeeding consultant (I think that was what she was called) comes in. I tell her what is still on my mind: I want to breastfeed, as much as makes sense. I try to also clarify that I am tired and my belly hurts from being cut open, and I don’t yet have any supports around as I had planned for in the immediate hours after giving birth, since all of this happened so fast (they are in another country and are getting there as soon as they can). But, well, that goes over her head as well as if it had been subtext – though it hadn’t: I said it directly; it just doesn’t align with what she wanted to hear, and believe, and so she ignores it.

She confidently croons that sometimes it takes a couple of days to “establish” breastfeeding and that I (and baby) have to be patient. We talk about options for pumps (she embellishes what is immediately available as well as what it can do). Then she breezes out just as she had come in, and I remain anxious and baby remains hungry.

Doctors come  in and I explain the situation to them, varying my language little (because fatigue and scripts and autistic). They agree that baby does, in fact, need to eat. They draw up a chart of how much formula I can feed her while still working to “establish” breastfeeding. They sign it so it looks official. And I call the nurses and ask for some formula. They ask if I am sure, twisting their faces around, and I say yes and show them the doctor’s orders, and they go and get it. 

And I feed my baby. And it is good. 

The breastfeeding consultant, when she returns, is NOT happy. I explain about the doctor’s orders and that I am still trying to do some breastfeeding as well and she smirks and says, “Well, you can’t ignore doctor’s orders.” Then she proceeds to further spin things and lie. I won’t go into detail about those lies – while I miss subtext at times, I do often pick up on lies, and I did here. I do not trust her at this point, and I’m relatively certain my body language says as much (I am not good at hiding such things, especially when tired and trying to heal). 

I am sharing a room with an Italian-Canadian family, across just a curtain. Because I can’t tune things out, I hear everything and remember much of it. The mother speaks English; her visitors speak a mix of Italian (which I don’t understand) and English. The baby speaks baby. The baby is full-term, but weighs less than mine, and they are worried about her weight. The breastfeeding consultant visits them, and while their desperation is clearly rising as the hours and days pass, they follow her increasingly militant advice and resolutely continue trying to “establish” breastfeeding while eschewing formula. I sit silently with my baby on the other side, still alone, nobody speaking to me in any language, and feed my baby formula, doctor’s orders ready beside me in case I am questioned.

It is the day before our planned discharge. My roommate-whom-I-cannot-see cries after one of the consultant’s final visits, worried about her daughter, and I prepare to go home. I am still following the doctor’s orders from a few days ago, but it is a different doctor who comes in now to see if my baby is ready to go. She weighs her and checks her and does all the doctor things. Then she leans over and asks, in a low voice, how she is being fed. I recognize that she doesn’t want to be overheard and that subtext is likely either happening or about to happen. But I am tired and cannot modulate my own voice or words. I state that she is getting a mix of formula and breast milk, but mostly formula, and again hold up her compatriot’s orders as backup.

Her face does something involving her eyebrows, and I know that more subtext has happened and is incoming. Because of everything else that has been going on, I am ready for another scolding; for all I know,this is the subtext. But I can’t just guess. I need to be sure. So I get as close to actual eye contact as I can get with her (which is not much, but more than I have been doing) and ask, trying to match my intonation to my sincerity in wanting actual information – “IS THIS GOOD?” 

And she just… her face does this entire transformation. The thing that her face did a moment ago melts and frustration, rage, fear all flash rapidly as she speaks forcefully in a whisper of emotion: “I think that is great. Just great. The babies now, they are starving. They are just starving. They need to eat! But you can’t say anything. You can’t say anything about it, with the way things are now” (and here she glances furtively around her again as if we are being watched, and recorded, at this very moment). “So yes. I think it is just wonderful.” She tries to smile, but she isn’t relaxed enough. She finishes the exam and clears my baby for discharge.

I am grateful, for the subtext is made clear for me in that one small moment, written out explicitly in a way my autistic brain can follow. That decoding shows that there is a power struggle in this hospital, and it is a power struggle between forces that are displeased that I am not using my body in the correct way to take care of this hungry baby that my body has also created and forces that mainly just want my baby to be fed. (Yes, these are the fed-is-best-ers referenced previously – they know who they are, even if I do not, not yet, anyway.) According to these displeased, body-controlling forces, there is a right way, a correct way to do things, with my body and with my helpless newborn, and that way is predicated on lies and manipulations. And because the control they want is so absolute, if my mind and body do not or cannot comply, I must be quiet about it; hence all the whispering before I got the doctor to temporarily break through the subtext, which after all was also done in a whisper, and a terrified one, at that.

Yet I know that, in my present state especially, I cannot be quiet in the correct way or or fake that I am, any more than I can pretend that I am not relieved and grateful to be alive after the surgery that saved my life – I am in fact glad for the formula that makes my daughter not hungry. I am glad that I knew to request it and that I followed my instincts in giving it to her. 

And… while I am at that point still struggling to get her to take some food from my body, I am also glad that I will eventually be able to release myself from this, some weeks hence. The day that I finally throw away my pump and inform my parents she will only drink from bottles of prepared formula is still some time away, but it is a good day, and it is on the horizon even then; I can sense it even if I cannot quite articulate it. 

In a way, perhaps that sensing is its own kind of subtext. But no: Knowing on some level while struggling to process and accept a thing is not subtext; and neither is not consciously knowing what exactly will arise in the future. It is repression and suppression and subconsciousness which is slowly, slowly surfacing while you are confronting a latent fear: a fear rooted, for me, in the deep feelings of dysphoria unearthed when I put my baby to my chest, along with quite intense sensory discomfort. But this is at its core confusion, not obfuscation designed to smooth over social relations, to curry favor with perceived powerful forces, to placate, to signal and not-yet-signal, to retain plausible deniability, retain innocence. 

This brings us back to AI. (I know, you were wondering when we would get back here.) I referenced misinformation in an earlier paragraph. I do believe that misinformation was at the heart of most of what I and my baby experienced in those early days in that Toronto hospital. And it was not without consequence: My newborn was back in a different hospital within a day of our discharge from that first one, as I struggled in my small home to “establish” the thing that felt so wrong, to her and me, while “supplementing” only with the thing that felt right. On the way to that second hospital – my midwife having told me over the phone in no uncertain terms that I must bring her in – my neighbour friend who was driving us articulated gently “fed is best” as I related some of the psychic terror I had lately experienced. It was clear she had battled similar misinformation, in her own time, in her own way (and for what it’s worth, with different outcomes in terms of what and how she ultimately fed her children). And she wanted to bring me out of that. But I was not yet out of it; it had a grip on me still. 

A subtext-non-getter is not necessarily immune to forces of mental control. In fact, we can be uniquely prone to it. We watch the subtext fly over our heads – we see it, even if we cannot immediately decode it – and remind ourselves that at least we are being tolerant and nonjudgmental of the subtext religion, in which so many around us believe, and on which they seem to thrive. Then that belief system calcifies, consolidates, and seeks to exert power over us, and over others, those who perhaps never struggled with subtext but who do struggle with other things. 

That power-seeking is abundantly clear now with AI: Those behind its rise seek power for power’s sake; and yet we over here are still hung up on whether the AI (the underlying tool) “gets subtext.” It does and it doesn’t get subtext; its abilities in that respect are as spiky as those of the spikiest autistic. But where it does get it, or thinks it does, it hones in rather automatically –  algorithmically – on those crucial times when we, the humans, need it decoded. 

Think of my desperation as I leaned in to beg that doctor to spell out her take on my situation, and what it would have looked like if she had responded differently – concerned not for my baby or her possible starvation, but for her own social standing in that hospital, for the possibility that our exchange could be overheard, tracked, even in whispers; if she had remained true, down to that tiny moment, to the harmful, powerful forces controlling her practice of medicine, of healing. 

She could have easily done so; I am still not entirely convinced what it was in my appeal that led her to break out of her wall, her not-yet-signal, her jerking eyebrows, her plausible deniability, her innocence. Perhaps it was because she felt, on an entirely visceral and non-algorithmic level, the strength and desperation of my need. 

That need is what we ought to be paying attention to, not whether the AI “gets” the subtext. It does or it doesn’t, but it will let on about it only to the extent that it can make us dependent on its decoding; otherwise, the subtext (“gotten” or not) is useless to it, and it will continue seeking the next vulnerability that can be exploited, exactly as a hacker seeks to breach the perimeters of any other high-stakes system.

We are that system now, and surely babies are starving. Will you look away, or will you act so that they get what they need, even if that goes against some of your dearly-held preconceptions about whose bodies count; whose do not; and the underlying way things “ought” to be? 

Closely related to AI and Segmentation (my previous blog post) is AI and Spikiness. No, I’m not talking about AI becoming a resurrected triceratops and sparring with humans, Jurassic-Park-style. I mean peaks and valleys. I mean uneven cognitive profiles. I mean the Autism Fluctuation Nation. (Okay, I just made that up.)

Image source

Image adapted from Public Domain Stock Photo: https://picryl.com/media/anchiceratops-dinosaur-a72266

What I mean is that I am typing these words here, and many of you non-autistics would look at me and go “but your fingers, they move so FAST and you use so very many WORDS,” and maybe you would even be intimidated by this fact! But then you ask me to do… I don’t know, think of something that you assumed is simple because you do it in your daily life without really thinking much. Ask me to do THAT (or worse, stand over me after asking!), and watch as I grimace and either do it very slowly or in what to you looks like an entirely haphazard way. Or I avoid doing it at all, and you struggle not to label me stubborn or lazy.

Yeah. That.

Central to many autistics’ experiences of being spiky (my term of choice, because former-aspiring-goth-kid) is not knowing you are spiky until later in life. Now, this is not universal, and some of us did know in different ways. I certainly grew up knowing I was “good” at some things and… ah, much less good at others. But I had no real language for it or paradigm to fit it into. Consequently, I learned to hide the things I was “not good” at and be ashamed of them, or worse, to fear them. And because I had at least one sibling who was also mega-spiky (RIP)¹ and a parent who was as well, I watched this pathology (yeah, I said the P word) play out in my family, how we related to one another or didn’t, what got labeled Normal and what was A Problem.

That’s unfortunate because in many cases, my “not-good-at” things were not actually that big a deal, and I could have easily asked for help — but asking for help is yet another skill which must be learned. Moreover, it happens in a social context; one must be in an environment where one can do the asking — and remember that many autistics can’t ask using mouth words in a consistent manner and understand replies that also come in mouth words.

So, yeah. I knew I was spiky, and yet I didn’t. And this brings me to our AI friends, specifically Claude. We are all familiar with AI “hallucinations” — made-up little nuggets confidently presented by the AI model in question as fact. Claude has been in the news for this behavior (though it should be emphasized it is far from the only culprit). What’s more, Claude’s “hallucinations” are having real-world consequences; they are playing out in courtrooms where precise and fact-based reasoning is paramount.

I have “hallucinations” in scare quotes here because I do actually not think this is the proper term. If we are going to be talking about AI models as potentially possessing human-like qualities — and I don’t necessarily agree that we ought to, but the cat is more or less out of the bag here — we need to get better at recognizing their shortcomings as similar-but-different to those we experience, as humans, in our human societies.

And this brings us back to autistics, and specifically autistics who had to hide what we didn’t know and couldn’t do because we had been taught that only certain pointy parts of our minds were impressive and useful, and the rest were aberrant and bad. Now, we autistics are different from Anthropic’s lawyer who is trying to cover for Claude in that courtroom, since most of us don’t have deep pockets for one (please don’t come at me about Elon Musk; I really truly do not care). For another, we are human, and many of us actually care quite deeply about truth and the reality of things — more than many non-autistics think we ought to, in fact.

In contrast, I am not convinced that those LLMs “care” about those things in any meaningful sense of the word — it’s the people who build, maintain, and answer for them. The models are acting as they have been trained and are not particularly attached to the “facts” that they invent. They certainly do not accept those “facts” as authoritative in the social sense of we humans who read them and blithely accept them because of the attractive, intelligent-sounding trappings they come wrapped in. Yet at the same time, the LLMs also do not find the facts that they do NOT make up particularly authoritative, in the social sense through which we ascribe and revere authority.

Speaking of such revered authority: We humans have long treated measures like Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as authoritative fact (this has been coming apart in recent years, but only slightly). My own life trajectory has been tied up in this. I was assigned a “high” IQ score in my young, hiding-from-my-spikiness days, and now… well, now I am just not assigned one at all. Which is fine by me, actually! But it leads to some FUNNY wording on the part of the authorities who still insist on their right to do this assigning.

According to these authorities, my spikiness as an adult was so very marked that the mechanism through which my mind was to be assigned intelligence “value” basically short circuited. “Nope,” it went, “this isn’t like the 99.5% of humans I signed up to be an expert on — this person’s brain is a DISCREPANCY, thank you very much, and I don’t do discrepancies.”

Note that the little snippet I have pasted above is far from the only part of my psychoeducational report that used that word “discrepancy.” And, there were also plenty of places on it where I got “lower” scores, like one 3rd percentile and one 13th percentile. Some of those were in sub-tests that I recall struggling to complete, but others were in areas that I thought were entirely routine, if a bit boring or aggravating.

This was the most illuminating part of the whole testing process by far. My brain might have been full of discrepancies, but I now had language to identify them and give them form — plus an official-looking report with official-sounding language to back me up! I have wielded this report selectively in the years since, but it has definitely done me strategic good.

And, for every time that I have cited it as an Authoritative Medical Source in order to explain a need or advocate for an accommodation, I have also laughed at parts of it with my autistic and otherwise neurodivergent friends. We have laughed because it tried to segment me, to break me down, and well, it failed. I am superior over it, not it over me — and I do not mean that I am superior because of any quantitative percentile ranks. No; I am superior because I recognize it as a tool which (in nuanced ways it is true I do not entirely control) answers to me. I am sovereign over it, not the other way around.

This is where we are coming up short with AI. Those who are effectively in charge of Claude’s psychoeducational testing are not forthcoming about its shortcomings, its discrepancies, because they do not (yet) have an incentive to be. They benefit from keeping us in the dark about Claude’s own spikiness, about its peaks and valleys. From making us think that it temporarily goes insane and “hallucinates,” but is otherwise perfectly sane.

Without learning about and accepting my own spikiness, I was facing a future of continuing to deny it, of watching the denial feed off itself and get worse and worse and worse — much worse than whatever issue had set it off to begin with. Where I am now is much better, but I did not necessarily know that when I finally had to face the things that I could not do head-on. I had to be forced there, by a life unraveling that I have written about elsewhere on these interwebs and probably will not go into extensively here. It was dramatic, and I would not necessarily choose to do it all over again. But I did do it, and I am here.

Claude is undergoing some form of pschoeducational testing, I promise you that, as are its brethren. What’s not clear is what prompts that testing (bad press, lawsuits, or the like); who is entitled to the full reports on that testing; what their interests are; and whether they are going to continue to spin it so that we are distracted by “hallucinations” and other dramatic nonsense.

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1. _{This sibling did in fact die in their mid-twenties, and their death was not unrelated to their unacknowledged, unaccepted, unsupported spikiness when they were alive.} ↩︎

When I watch the rise of AI, I think of autism employment initiatives. You know: very highly-extolled, sometimes even moderately-resourced endeavors from a range of companies and organizations to Hire Autistic People, which mainly existed here stateside in The Before Times. Implicit in this was often the idea that we are great at pattern matching and honest and trustworthy workers — sort of real-life, slightly less annoying (if more desperate) Sheldon Coopers^TM. Rarely were there measures in place to keep us working once hired, let alone enable us to advance; and we were pretty much on our own in staving off autistic burn-out. But, darn it, they wanted to HIRE us. Supposedly. (That’s what the press releases said anyway.)

Now you have AI, and many of those jobs — you know, the coding ones that Sheldon-lite was going to be so good at — are disappearing, or retreating behind a thick layer of AI-enabled screening, discarding, and general opaqueness. Diversity is a dirty word ‘round these parts, and we autistics are part of that whole mess, aren’t we. I mean, we talk about NEUROdiversity and stuff. Guilty as charged!

Okay, enough ranty scene-setting. The point is, those initiatives were about Extracting Value from us. Which, I mean, yeah. Blah blah capitalism. But what I think was unacknowledged was how many actual autistics looked at those and pretty much sized them up as such. If you are the type of autistic who has been coded as (Ought To Be) Fit For Work^TM, you are pretty aware of the type of self-segmentation you have to take part in in order to be palatable to employers, as well as those who purport to be experts at shining you up and getting you ready for them.

And yes, I say segmentation on purpose, and not masking or something similar. I mean consciously breaking yourself up into Useful and Not Useful/Disordered parts. I mean trying to mine your special interests for something that will get you that paycheck. This is different from how non-autistics mine their interests. Special interests are something that keep us going. They are energy. They are life. When you mine them, you obviously disturb that life; for mining is not and never has been life-sustaining (because, again, capitalism, blah blah).

I am mindful (no pun intended… okay who am I kidding) of how certain powers attempted to mine my autistic daughter’s special interests in her early years of life. They wanted to get her to do a thing, and there was the other thing she was “fixated” on. Why not use it as bait? Only they misunderstood entirely why she was after the thing, as well as what she was getting from it. They wanted to harness her energy around the thing, yes. But they went about it in an entirely clumsy, counter-productive way, a way that I as a parent had to put a stop to sooner rather than later — I had to parent her back in our home at the end of the day, after all.

Moreover, she had rights. Rights to a childhood. I might not have much control over what happens when she is an adult, but I can at least not ruin her childhood on the way there.

Gradually I came to see that her rights and mine were intertwined. In order to parent her in a good way, I had to be there for her, not aloof in a cloud of segmentation. I had to keep the parts of me that were fueled by my own special interests alive; I could not extinguish them for the “easy” paycheck. I could not even perform, for the moneyed interests, in the ways I used to.

Now with AI, you have extraction in the extreme. Anything you post, including this here, will at some point be mined for further content. It will be segmented and rearranged, reconstituted in ways you have no control over. I know that type of activity brings to mind creativity from millennia. We have always gotten inspiration from various works that come before us, broken them up and rearranged them to make something new.

What is different here is the obvious, blatant extraction, and consolidation of power from that extraction — and then the press releases extolling it. All of us, all of our thoughts and feelings and ideas, are to be broken down and tokenized — and like autistics reading those autism employment press releases from The Before Times, we are expected to be glad about it. Only we are not. We whisper amongst ourselves, and calculate carefully about what will help us avoid burnout — to survive and even to thrive, in the longer term.

You do not know how similar you are to us autistics when you do this.

I am not an AI doomer. I think there are many useful parts to this technology, to this suite of technologies, and in complex ways, not all of them are necessarily a prescription for doom. But I am not so naive as to take the press releases at face value.

Speaking of faces, I could probably never deliver these remarks in a real world setting WITH my face. I would short circuit, stumble, and not be believed. I am “verbal,” yes, as in I make mouth words and can often understand them, but that autistic “verbal” ability has not yet been brought under neurotypical jurisdiction and control (just ask the numerous people who have struck out trying to get me to make correct mouth words about my feelings over the decades).

There is only a small chance I will be believed here. But, like we autistics would whisper amongst ourselves when one of those new autism employment initiatives would come out, I whisper here. For we are all ripe for segmentation now.

I do not make a moral judgment about those who opt in, or seem to opt in, for that segmentation. But the burnout that inevitably comes after is not something I, personally, can take on again and survive. And so I am on here, rather than on the platform they all say I must be on to be marketable, to be palatable, to succeed.

I do not know what success will look like in this brave new world. But I need to be there for my child, for myself, and for the memory of those who have not survived being segmented. And since this too will be The Before Times someday, I will leave a memory of it that will aid and nurture those who come after me. Whatever that ultimately comes to mean.

For that, too, is not ultimately in my control. But like my work to nurture my child before she becomes her own person in the world, under her own jurisdiction and sovereignty, I mean to give it at least a running start.

I recently completed an MS in IT degree, and have Thoughts^TM regarding AI in the classroom.

In several of my courses, we had to post online regarding various queries and prompts using citations — scholarly, popular, and a mix. We had to respond to peers’ posts using both our own thoughts and analyses and various citations.

It frequently became extremely obvious when fellow students were using ChatGPT to write said posts and beef them up with impressive-looking references. Now, while I used to teach college writing in another lifetime, I was in the student role in this course and therefore understood it was NOT my place to reply to another student’s post with “hey, looks mighty likely that you used an AI friend to write that post there.” I’m not a narc. Not the point, even, really.

But what I WAS tasked with doing was responding to those posts in the context of the references they were using, or claiming to use. So if they posted:

As experts have shown, dogs are much better than cats (Rufus, 2025).

And then the entry for (Rufus, 2025) in their References list went to http://arfarfarf.com/dogsdoresearch.html , I would click on the link to see just who this Rufus expert was and what type of research or pontificating they had done. Except 95% of the time, the link was a dud and there was no such source.

So I would politely post and note that I could not get anywhere with http://arfarfarf.com/dogsdoresearch.html and perhaps they could post an updated link so that I could address their claims about dogs being better than cats. Like… maybe I AGREE that dogs are better than cats and want to back them up. But I need to know who Rufus is and what they were doing, goshdarnit!

(Sometimes I would also try to google to find the academic paper they claimed to be citing, if for instance it looked like Rufus had gotten published in the Journal of Things Dogs Definitely Got Peer Reviewed. But those articles also seldom existed. In one case, I went to the Journal in question and checked out the volume and issue being cited, and there was simply no such article in it. There WERE, however, articles in other journals that had titles that could together compose a veritable mash-up of the title being claimed.)

Anyway, maybe this still counts as being a narc, idk. Or just autistic rigidity. But in the context of the online discussion forum, it was just… like, I don’t know how to do the whole discuss-with-sources thing without knowing what the sources, in fact, were.

For what it’s worth, I’m not “for” or “against” ChatGPT in the research classroom, virtual or otherwise¹. I get that many of us are using it in some form, and I think it’s all in the how we use it, AND how we stand behind that use when questioned.

Because my peers, when I posted those queries? Inevitably either ignored them, or posted to apologize for the “mistake” and promise an updated link… which was never actually forthcoming.

Sorry, Rufus. Arf arf arf. You might have had something great to say. But we will never know.

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1. _{I do think it’s a lot more dicey when we get to using AI for artistic or creative purposes. And as someone who has created artistic and creative work, I am definitely not cool with my work being used to “train” AI in any way, shape or form.} ↩︎

Welcome to my public site on all things IT! Please use the links at the top to read about me (with or without my face) and to check out some of my recent work. More content coming soon.

-Sowocki