When AI is an Accessibility Tool and Who Gets to Decide What Counts as Creativity?
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
DJ Jesse Hudson is a cognitive health advocate, media creator, and founder of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Fight (CTE Fight). Through The Rabbit Hole, he documents lived experience with brain injury while exploring how artificial intelligence (AI), storytelling, and community can support cognitive awareness, recovery, and resilience.
Artificial intelligence is often debated as a threat to creativity, but for some people, it can be a vital accessibility tool. Jesse Hudson explores how AI can help bridge cognitive barriers, why blanket judgments about its use can become ableist, and what this means for the future of creativity and human expression.
Not once. Someone decided to go through my DJ and artist page and repeatedly post an image declaring: “Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mark of a talentless loser.”
Different posts. Same message. Normally, I'd tell someone like that exactly where they can put their opinion and continue with my day. But this one deserves a longer answer because I'm brain-injured, and AI isn't simply something I use to make pictures. AI is an accessibility tool for me.
The idea is still there
One of the strangest things about living with brain injury is knowing that something is still inside your head while sometimes struggling to get it out.
The idea can be there. The story can be there. The image can be there. The solution can be there. But the pathway between thinking it and expressing it doesn't always work the way it once did.
Memory can fail. Words disappear. Concentration collapses. Organizing several thoughts simultaneously can become exhausting. Sometimes I can work at an extraordinary pace. Sometimes something ridiculously simple becomes difficult. That's neurological injury.
So I use tools. One of those tools is artificial intelligence. AI can help me organize thoughts, retrieve structure, explore an idea visually, develop concepts, communicate, write, edit, and turn something inside my head into something another human being can actually see.
Does the machine contribute? Of course it does. That's why it's a tool. But the intention didn't originate in the machine. It originated in me.
Accessibility doesn't make someone less creative
We don't tell a person using speech-to-text that the computer wrote their thoughts. We don't tell someone using a screen reader that they didn't really read something. We don't tell someone using a wheelchair that getting somewhere doesn't count because technology helped them move.
Accessibility technology exists because human beings encounter barriers. Cognitive barriers are barriers too. That's the part of the AI debate we're barely talking about.
When someone automatically declares that anybody using AI is talentless, they have no idea why that person might be using it.
For someone else, AI might be entertainment. For another person, it might increase productivity. For me, sometimes it's a bridge across a damaged neurological pathway.
You don't get to look at the bridge and decide the person crossing it has no talent because they needed one.
No, I haven't replaced human artists
Here's where today's accusation becomes particularly ridiculous. I recently put out a call for artists. I want painters. Digital artists. Video creators. Designers. Musicians. People working in physical media. People working in digital media.
Yesterday, I recorded a podcast with painters who create artwork and clothing. I now have a video artist involved in what I'm building. I'm talking with other creators. They're starting to come out of the woodwork. That's exactly what I wanted.
I don't see a future where humans compete against machines for permission to be creative. I see humans using technology and working with other humans to create things none of us would necessarily create alone. AI doesn't have to replace collaboration. It can expand it.
The hypocrisy gets interesting
There's another wrinkle to being repeatedly attacked for using AI: the attacks are happening on one of the world's largest technology platforms.
Modern digital platforms already depend heavily on algorithmic and AI-driven systems: content recommendations, ranking, advertising, moderation, image processing, accessibility, personalization, and detection systems. People interact with AI-mediated infrastructure constantly, often without thinking about it.
That doesn't mean everyone using a modern platform must support every application of artificial intelligence.
There are legitimate arguments about generative AI. Copyright matters. Consent matters. Compensation matters. Training data matters. Employment matters. Bias matters. Environmental impact matters. Governance absolutely matters. We should debate all of those things. But the meaningful question isn't: AI or no AI? That world is already gone.
The questions now are: Which AI? Used for what? Controlled by whom? Accountable to whom, and for whose benefit?
That is a much harder conversation than posting a meme calling somebody a loser.
When anti-AI absolutism becomes ableism
This is where I think the technology conversation has a blind spot. If you don't like AI-generated artwork, say so. If you believe a particular model was trained unethically, challenge it. If you believe creators deserve compensation, fight for them. If you believe corporations are deploying artificial intelligence irresponsibly, demand accountability. I probably agree with you on more of those things than you might expect.
But when you see someone using AI and immediately decide that person is lazy, fraudulent, or talentless, you've skipped an important question: Why are they using it?
Because when the answer is accessibility, that blanket judgment starts looking very different. If you're comfortable benefiting from AI when it's buried invisibly inside the infrastructure you use every day, but ridicule a person with cognitive challenges for visibly using AI to overcome barriers created by brain injury, perhaps your problem isn't actually artificial intelligence. Perhaps you never bothered to understand the human being using it.
Creativity is more than execution
We're also going to have to reconsider what creativity means. Is creativity the physical execution? The original idea? The judgment behind thousands of decisions? The ability to recognize what works and what doesn't? The intention? The story? The emotional meaning? The responsibility for the final result? Probably some combination of all of them.
AI complicates authorship because machines can increasingly generate, critique, revise, and iterate. That's precisely why human responsibility becomes more important rather than less.
As AI becomes more capable, the fundamental questions increasingly become: Who chose what should exist? Why? Who benefits? Who can be harmed? Who has authority? Who takes responsibility?
We've just left the argument about AI art. Now we're talking about governance.
Don't judge the tool before you understand the barrier
I don't know exactly where artificial intelligence is taking creativity. Neither does anybody else. We're figuring this out while the technology develops underneath our feet.
There will be extraordinary uses. There will be terrible uses. There will be exploitation. There will be empowerment. There will be people with disabilities who discover that something everyone else considers a novelty gives them back an ability they thought they'd lost.
Those people deserve a place in this conversation. So criticize AI. Challenge it. Question it. Regulate it where necessary. Build better systems. Protect artists. Protect human beings.
But before you look at another person's work and decide they're a “talentless loser” because they used artificial intelligence, ask one question first: What barrier might this tool be helping them overcome?
Because sometimes the technology isn't replacing the human. Sometimes it's helping the human get back into the room.
Read more from DJ Jesse Hudson
DJ Jesse Hudson, AI-Driven Cognitive Health Advocate
DJ Jesse Hudson is a cognitive health advocate, media creator, and founder of CTE Fight. Living with the long-term effects of brain injury, he uses storytelling and lived experience to raise global awareness around cognitive health and recovery. Through The Rabbit Hole, he explores how artificial intelligence (AI), media, and community can support resilience, continuity, and human dignity. His work bridges advocacy, innovation, and culture to make complex brain health conversations accessible and real.
