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HOW CAN GENERATIVE AI SUPPORT INCLUSION AND HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NEURODIVERSE

To mark National Inclusion Week, organised every year by Inclusive Employers, Erica explores how Generative AI supports inclusion and helps people who are neurodiverse.

Diversity is a great thing.

Different views and ideas bring innovation, inclusivity, engagement, community, and commitment. Diversity isn’t always visible differences or protected characteristics though.

We’re learning that neurodiversity is one of the most prominent ways to understand the needs of people – the different ways people think, behave and act due to our biological wiring and brain make-up.

The World Economic Forum states 17% of people live with one or more neurological conditions, and 14% are neurodivergent in the UK. At the same time, in the US, 25% of adults have a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. (‘How cognitive diversity in AI can help close the disability inclusion gap’, April 2023).

People who are neurodiverse – my story

I was diagnosed with hyperactivity behavioural disorder when I was six years old. This is now recognised as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Fully Accepting this in my forties has enabled me to embrace these differences and develop an interest in how learning technology, specifically generative artificial intelligence, can support these differences. (Or as I prefer to call them -superpowers.)

Generative AI has the potential to offer several benefits to neurodiverse individuals in various ways. So, I asked ChatGPT4 how generative AI can help people who are neurodiverse, and this is what it told me.

How can generative AI support inclusion and help people who are neurodiverse?

Communication and Language Support

Assistive Communication Devices: Generative models can enhance text-to-speech and speech-to-text applications, making them more accurate and adaptable for users with conditions like autism or verbal communication difficulties.
Social Training Simulators: AI can generate realistic conversational scenarios to help individuals with social interaction challenges, such as those with Asperger’s syndrome, to practice social cues and responses.
Language Tailoring: AI can adapt and modify the complexity or tone of text, making information more accessible to people with different cognitive abilities.

Educational Support

Personalised Learning: Generative AI can create custom learning materials, exercises, or lesson plans that cater to different learning styles and cognitive profiles.
Virtual Tutors: Generative models could act as intelligent, responsive tutoring systems to provide real-time academic assistance, particularly beneficial for those with ADHD or other conditions that may require specialized attention.
Sensory Engagement: AI can generate sensory stimuli, like sounds, images, or even tactile feedback, tailored to individuals with sensory sensitivities or differences, such as those found in autism spectrum disorders.

Mental Health and Well-being

Therapeutic Support: While not a replacement for a human therapist, AI-powered chatbots can offer immediate, cost-effective psychological support. This can be particularly helpful for people with anxiety disorders, depression, or other mental health conditions often found to co-occur with neurodiversity.
Mood Monitoring and Intervention: AI algorithms can analyse text, voice, or even biometric data to detect mood changes and offer timely interventions or coping strategies.

Accessibility

Natural Language Processing for Accessibility Tools: Generative AI can improve screen readers, predictive text, and other accessibility tools to make them more intuitive and versatile for people with various disabilities, including neurodiversity.
Customisation: AI can generate personalized user interfaces for software or websites based on an individual’s specific cognitive or sensory needs.

Creative Expression

Adaptive Art and Music Creation Tools: Generative AI can be tuned to accommodate the unique ways in which neurodiverse individuals may interact with creative software, making the creative process more accessible and rewarding.
Narrative and Storytelling: AI can help in generating story outlines, characters, or even dialogue, serving as a creative assistant for people who might find the structuring of such elements challenging.

While these applications offer promise, it’s crucial to approach them with sensitivity to ethical considerations like privacy, autonomy, and the avoidance of stigmatisation. It’s also vital to include neurodiverse individuals in the design and testing of these technologies to ensure they genuinely meet the needs and respect the rights of these populations.

(ChatGPT, Generative AI, 7th September 2023)

How Generative AI helps me

Generative AI allows me to indulge my need to hyperfocus. What I call, ‘going down the rabbit hole’. As neurodiverse individuals, we must monitor and manage this behaviour as it can be tiresome. We don’t often realise the time and effort we put into a single focus. Now, rather than spending hours researching a topic using Google (which I used to do), I get the same (if not more) volume of information in seconds with the correct prompts using ChatGPT4.

It also enables me to role play – set assessment questions, test theories, suggest new ideas, answer in the style of a persona, summarise books which I’ve always wanted to read but never had the concentration space to, and summarise reports and provide insight (for the same reason).

That said, it’s not a silver bullet. We’d be wrong to pray in the church of AI for everything. Well-known faults of current Large Language Models include bias, hallucinations (where the AI has been known to ‘make up’ information as it has no understanding of context), and of course plagiarism.

Generative AI, neurodiversity and inclusion

The World Economic Forum also states that developing policies to support cognitive diversity can impact, and indeed benefit, both an individual’s general well-being and the wider economy.

These should include technologies for age-associated cognitive impairment, areas of mental health and neurological disorders, smart cities, adaptive learning, and workplace technologies.

We can help build a better society for everyone by improving inclusion for people with disabilities through assistive and AI-based technologies – enabling them to live active and fulfilling lives.

As a neurodivergent loving the use of AI and digital technologies, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

My TEDx talk, ‘Reforming Education with the Digital First Mindset’ outlines the need for immersive learning technology to develop future skills It’s worth a watch.