The concept that "disabled artists using AI" is even a major disabled or artist community discourse is so funny.
It just isn't a conversation any disabled artists or disabled people who would like to become artists is having. It was for like fifteen minutes, the concensus was an extremely loud and obvious "fuck off," and that was that. I don't know why AI dorks are holding on to this one.
Broadly, people who need assistive devices, prosthesis and so on know the difference between doing something for themselves using a tool, and having something done for them. Of course we understand that AI art is no more "making art" than ordering something off Ubereats is "making a sandwich."
Yet I shit you not, if you spend time among AI art gremlins, you will run into people desperate to make up stories about people with neuropathy, an amputation, or an intellectual disability (it's always these three, have you noticed?) proudly printing out and pinning their AI generated art to the fridge.
Earlier tonight I saw someone claim that famous comic book artist Earl Norm, who retired from professional work in 2005 due to his arthritis, would've surely continued working in the industry if only he had access to fucking Bing Image Generator.
This dorklord attached some Norm art claiming it "looks AI anyway."
Mate, if it "looks AI" at all, it's because AI models have consumed everything this bloke made during his career and can now create hollow replicas. My point being, they'll insult disabled artists while claiming their goonish computer has made the world easier for us.
Now, I don't like the rosey image of all disabled people "overcoming" their disabilities to become painters and the like if we want to, that's simply not the case. In fact, systemic ableism will characterize artwork by disabled artists differently, as inferior or lacking intention or as a dramatic insight into a shattered mind.
The far more compelling thing one could do to accommodate disabled art is not to create tools that "enable" us by doing the whole thing for us, but to destigmatize disabled art, and allow it to be assessed honestly on its own merits instead of as a part of some inspiration porn or similar narrative.
But the idea that disabled people, artists and disabled artists writ large are even having this conversation is so childish and bespeaks an outsider who wants to use us as an ideological or rhetorical tool to, what, sell a stupid plagiarism device to normies? As if we haven't seen "new technology marketed using disabled people as a mascot" before?
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