There's an anarchist who is really cool, one that I genuinely appreciate (and they're an egoist - generally I don't vibe with the egoists) who will straight up die on the hill that AI is an accessibility tool and that it's a very beneficial thing.

Here's my position:

Many disabled people need or heavily benefit from tech like PCs, whether it's for gaming or accessibility stuff or comfort shows or socializing or making art (will return to this in a moment.) AI is pricing everyone out of ram and GPUs, putting often very important tech out of the hands of disabled people.

AI is used to parse job applications and it does sentiment analysis and detects anything anomalous in terms of writing style or tone and it filters it out or scores it lower than writing that fits the norm. This creates additional barriers to disabled people getting jobs and joining the workforce where they have communication differences.

Education is strongly shifting back to exams because it's now one of the only ways to assess learning that doesn't permit the use of AI - almost every other form of academic assessment can be fudged by use of AI and often there's no way to prevent it. This sucks because exams test for performance under exam conditions and for a vast array of disabilities, exams are hell and disabled people perform poorly under them so AI is putting education out of reach on that count but also, as above, assessors are using AI to mark papers and provide feedback which sucks if your ability to express yourself within the expected norms is not easy/possible, not to mention if your ability to parse implication is impacted by your disability. Basically AI does vibe-marking and vibe-feedback so if you aren't a native at vibe-communication then you get punished by being marked down by AI and the feedback will be to improve the vibes and it will give you vague, vibe feedback which can be very hard to parse.

Disabled people are routinely pushed out of employment and into the margins of society, often due to lack of accessibility. Since the dawn of capitalism, disabled people have disproportionately occupied roles that make money through commission work that can be done at the discretion of the disabled person - things like editing, sex work, and especially art and crafts have been generally more accommodating avenues for making a living for disabled people. AI is decimating these freelance industries, especially if Grok continues with its creepy shit, and this means that it's putting crucial and hard to come by income further out of reach for a demographic grossly overrepresented in poverty statistics due to discrimination (including structural discrimination), and this demographic usually has much higher living expenses so if their ability to generate income is negatively impacted by AI then it also puts access to education, healthcare, suitable accommodation, and social participation further out of reach for a demographic that typically struggles in these domains because they have higher needs or atypical needs in some/all of them.

AI exploits psychiatric disability. (Yes, it's psychiatric disability and not just the sugar-coated "mental illness".) It fosters psychosis and delusions in vulnerable users, it encourages people to violent acts (not to mention criminal acts) and to clocking out early. AI can be extremely harmful to some people with disability.

I'm very dubious that AI can be called an accessibility tool but, presuming that it is one for argument's sake, it's a Faustian bargain of an accessibility tool because while it may put some things closer within reach for some disabled people, the broader effect is to make things overall far worse and much more inaccessible for most disabled people.