ChatGPT As a Tool For Neurodivergent People
How AI Can Help People Independently Navigate the World
ChatGPT Isn’t Just a Tool for Students Who Don’t Want To Write Their Essays Themselves
Its uses go beyond writing country love songs about your pets.
When used properly, ChatGPT can be a valuable resource for anyone, including those on the autism spectrum.
It can help with social interactions, time management, managing anxiety, it can even help with the job hunt.
This article explores how AI can make life easier for everyone.
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How ChatGPT Can Help Neurodivergent People
Neurodivergent is a term used to describe people whose neurological differences affect how their brain functions. It includes conditions such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia, and typically develops during childhood but is often either untreated or under-treated.
Because of this, neurodiverse children may not get the proper opportunities to learn to live with their conditions.
AI is a solution that is leveling the playing field.
ChatGPT Revolutionizes Communication and Learning, Empowering the Neurodiverse and Fostering Inclusivity
For example, InnerVoice by iTherapy is revolutionizing the way neurodivergent children learn. InnerVoice is an app that utilizes AI to help users better form connections between objects and language. Users can use their phone camera to show an object, and the software will explain or label the object for them in real time.
However, the AI does not just explain what objects are, but it can also explain concepts and movements via the use of gifs. This feature furthers the development of students’ connection between speech and reality. The app also features an AI-powered 3D avatar feature that allows the user to create a replica of themselves and then have the avatar talk using a text-to-speech feature. This is especially useful for nonverbal children or others with speech deficits or difficulties because it allows them to visualize themselves speaking and create a realistic avatar to emulate.
InnerVoice also has a prompting feature, which allows educators to send a prompt from their device to the student’s device, guiding the student to the correct answer and helping avoid classroom frustration while still involving them in classroom activities.
Image to speech technology like InnerVoice focuses on developing kids’ speech skills and is especially helpful for young neurodivergent students.
Artificial Intelligence Works With Neurodiversity
AI-powered tools help adults as well as youth. Salesforce recently created an AI that uses abstraction to summarize long bodies of text. Everyday we encounter large volumes of new information and have to quickly absorb and process it to use in our daily lives. For many neurodivergent people, this can be a cognitive overload.
This is where Salesforce’s summarization technology comes in: by summarizing large bodies of text into smaller, more digestible paragraphs, neurodiverse employees are less overwhelmed by the volume of information. Abstraction is important to this technology as it allows the software to use words not in the text to form a summary. A perfected abstract method will allow the AI to form much more descriptive and accurate summarizations than with an extraction method.
While this is still a relatively new technology, it is already producing promising results in the form of coherent paragraphs that effectively summarize different texts.
ChatGPT and AI collaboratively embrace neurodiversity, and foster an inclusive and supportive work environment for all.
Enabling Neurodiverse Employment Success With ChatGPT
These tools are not simply improving accessibility in the field of education, but they are also improving neurodivergent individuals’ accessibility to jobs. With the increasing popularity of AI, many companies have begun to develop algorithms to complete tasks like pattern-recognition. Building these algorithms requires software developers with specialized skills in technology, science, data analysis, pattern recognition, etc.
However, the pool of individuals with these skills is shrinking, so companies need to maximize the talents of workers they do have and employ new talents. This is where many neurodivergent people excel: in fields that require technologically-inclined and detail-oriented workers with strong skills in analytics, mathematics, pattern recognition, and information processing.
In recent years, companies have found that neurodivergent employees outperform their neurotypical counterparts in these fields and are the more efficient hire.
This new incentive to hire neurodivergent workers has driven positive change in the workplace, fostering a more inclusive environment for those who are neurodivergent and opening new opportunities.
More companies are offering accommodations, such as private offices for their neurodivergent employees to reduce the amount of external distractions. EY, a company making an effort to hire neurodivergent talent, is taking extra steps to help their new hires better adapt. Managers have changed their speech to explain concepts and instructions more effectively by removing idioms and other abstract speech. This has not only helped neurodivergent workers adapt to the work environment, but EY says it has also helped their managers become more effective leaders by pushing them to use more precise language, so as to not confuse employees.
It is progressive change like this that is helping normalize neurodiversity in the workplace.