AI can make Hollywood sets more accessible for disabled people, but it still has no idea how to replicate diversity on screen or in its output, experts and advocates said at TheWrap’s Grill conference this week.
“AI is not intelligence. It’s mimicking intelligence,” Candis Welch, the Chief Equity Officer for California’s Department of Rehabilitation, said. “It’s mimicking what our society is putting in. So if our society … has ableism and different levels of discrimination, it’s not going to produce something different when you type it into ChatGPT, or whatever you may use.”
“A perfect example of that is if you were to ask AI to provide you a visual of leadership and make it diverse, it’s going to be all Caucasian males, and the diversity is going to be one Caucasian female,” she continued. “That is not the true telling of our society, so it’s lacking in that area.”
Experts on the panel at TheWrap’s annual Grill conference covering AI’s role in disability access and visibility in film and TV, presented by Easterseals Southern California, agreed there are some pretty significant limitations.
Alongside moderator Kristen Lopez, Welch, actress, entrepreneur and disability advocate Lolo Spencer, comedian Adam Conover and filmmaker Ashley Eakin expounded on why AI struggles to reflect a diverse society, and the practical ways it can help.
Eakin, a writer and director, suggested that anyone who works with people who have disabilities should use AI to recommend accommodations.
“I encourage people out there who work with other people with disabilities, you can go to AI and say, ‘Hey, how can I make my set more accessible for this community?’” she said. “It spits you out a whole long list of amazing accommodations, and I think that’s ways that we can be learning.”
“But then also hire the production accessibility coordinator, because people’s needs are different,” she continued.
The panelists largely agreed that AI isn’t capable of recognizing those individual needs, even when prompted.
Spencer, who stars on Max’s “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” noted that she’s played around with text-to-image software herself to experiment with what a program might spit out when asked to create a character in a wheelchair, and the results were laughable.
“AI wouldn’t even be able to formulate what that looks like. I mean, I’ve used Midjourney before, because I was testing that out just playing around,” she recalled. “And, you know, you type in ‘wheelchair,’ my God – it was everything but a wheelchair.”
Conover agreed that AI is not actually intelligence, and offered an alternative.
“The amount of attention that is going towards AI versus — if you take one little fraction of the money spent on AI and spend it addressing disability directly, it would be incredibly effective,” he said.
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