Me, Myself, and AI
A short personal essay on writing a personal essay
“Nothing about us, without us.”
This was the motto of the late 20th century disability rights movement.
Recently I drafted an extensive essay on how I aspired to this principle as an evaluator of health and human service programs—as well as someone living with a misunderstood disability.
When it comes to writing, AI technology has been a boon to both evaluators and people with disabilities. I am heavily dependent on AI for spellchecking—poor hand-eye coordination makes typos plentiful and inevitable. However, expressing myself—imperfect as it may be—is one task I don’t want to delegate to AI.
On occasion, I’ll use AI when I’m stuck on a word. I asked Copilot AI whether my usage of the word glurge was appropriate in my “nothing about us, without us” essay. Expecting a simple yes/no and perhaps some alternative terms, the lengthy analysis was shocking. It ended with:
It’s not glurge, it’s imposter syndrome.
In other words, I wasn’t a sloppily sentimental pseudo-researcher playing the “if you can’t deny it, glorify it” game regarding my disability. Instead, I had internalized traditional academia’s ableism and participated in my own epistemic erasure. (Not a direct quote—I lost the original conversation, but that was the gist).
A person who is skeptical of AI, or skeptical of Carolyn Sullins’ capabilities, would say that AI’s large language model is programmed to tell us exactly what we want to hear--not what is accurate.
I fit into both those categories of people.
So my shock was how well AI performed its individualized, sycophantic tasks.
I wondered: if AI accomplished this so well for someone with a PhD in Educational Psychology and 25 years of research and evaluation experience, imagine what it could do for (or to) a suggestible child.
Then again, with different prompts, AI has compared everyone with my disability to suggestible children--as have human researchers since the 19th century.
Nothing about us, without us.
Although I wrote this essay about AI, without AI.
This reflection resonates with me.
AI can be a powerful tool for exploring ideas and expanding perspective. But it also raises a deeper question: when do we return to our own internal system and integrate what we’ve learned?
For me, knowledge is never absolute. In many ways, knowledge is also a form of not-knowing — something provisional, evolving, always open to revision. And perhaps that is exactly how it should be.
My deeper wish is not to accumulate certainty, but to keep integrating what I learn and then return to my own way of seeing. Tools can support that process — but they should never replace it.
The absence of absolute knowledge is not a flaw. It is what keeps curiosity, humility, and exploration alive.