AI and Neurodiversity in Practice

I held my first big stage role at six years old and could not get through a chapter book until I was about ten. Both of those things were happening at the same time. Nobody put them together until much later. I was just the kid who was fine at hearing things and not fine at reading them.

That gap shaped everything I did after. I want to say in plain language what AI tools actually do for a brain like mine, because most of what is written about this online is either marketing or panic, and I have been running on these tools every day for two years.

Most of what gets written about AI for creative professionals treats us as a single audience with one set of needs. We are not. The dyslexic actor and the ADHD founder and the neurotypical writer all want different things from the same tools. The framing below is from one corner of that audience: the late-diagnosed neurodivergent kind. Other corners will have other rules.

What the tool actually fixes

Reading long emails. The tool reads them out to me, in summary, in the order that matters. The order that matters is not the order the email is written in. Most long business emails bury the actual ask in paragraph four. The tool finds paragraph four. I read paragraph four. Then I read the rest if it matters.

Writing without flinching. I have spent my whole working life flinching at the page. Dyslexia gives you a little hesitation before every word, and after enough years that hesitation becomes the loudest thing in the room. The tool gives me a draft. The draft is wrong, in the specific way the tool is always wrong, but the draft is on the page. I can edit a wrong draft. I cannot edit a blank page. Editing is a different brain task than starting. The tool does the starting.

Holding three things at once. ADHD does not give you fewer thoughts. It gives you more thoughts at the same time. The tool is a place to put two of the three thoughts so I can finish the first one. I open three tabs and run three conversations in parallel. I come back to each one. The tool keeps the place I left.

Translating between modes. I think out loud. I always have. The tool will let me ramble for ten minutes into a microphone, then hand me back a clean structure of what I actually said. That is not the tool writing for me. That is the tool helping me hear myself the way other people hear me. Nobody had ever done that before.

What the tool makes worse if you are not careful

It will let you not finish a thought. ADHD already does this. The tool will help you do it more elegantly. You can have it generate a hundred half-finished things in a day. You can convince yourself you are productive because the volume is high. The volume is not the work. The work is finishing the one thing.

It will let you outsource your taste. Dyslexia made me develop strong opinions early because I had to take in less material per hour than my classmates and I had to make every piece of material count. If I let the tool generate too much, my taste muscle gets less reps. I have to read more from humans, not less.

It will let you skip the body. The tool is on my phone. The phone is in my pocket on the bike ride. The bike ride is the part of the day where my brain reorders itself. I leave the phone alone.

The actual rule I run on

The tool is a ramp, not a wheelchair. I am still doing the work. The tool gets me to the part of the work my brain is good at faster, by handling the parts my brain is not built for. I get to do more of the work I was made to do. That is the whole pitch.

The good parts of being dyslexic and ADHD, the pattern recognition, the cross-domain pull, the willingness to start, the appetite for the strange room, those are not weaknesses I want compensated for. Those are the work.

The tool runs the warmup. I run the show.

Cheers.