Feminism, Disability Access, & AI

Join us for the first event in the Rosemary Murray Library Conversations, a new series bringing women's voices to the questions shaping our society and culture. This year's Conversations focus on artificial intelligence. Dr Amy Gaeta will deliver the talk, which will be followed up by a Q&A with Alberto Garcia, Librarian at Rosemary Murray Library, and the audience. This talk builds on feminist theories of passivity and disability theories of creativity and access to examine possibilities and contradictions of making poetry with a form of AI called automatic speech recognition, commonly known as speech to text. Against both techno-utopian narratives of accessibility and independence, I develop the concept of willed passivity to describe a feminist crip practice of intentionally embracing dependence, bodily limitation, and technological mediation. Leaving transcription errors, glitches, and bodily interruptions within the poems foregrounds the interdependence between disabled bodymind and accessibility software, challenging liberal ideals of autonomous authorship and creativity. This talk inhabits the ethical tensions of using AI-powered access software, demonstrating how disabled artists navigate accessibility through technologies embedded within systems of extraction while simultaneously cultivating alternative modes of relation, authorship, and aesthetics. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing conversations on the politics of artistic creation with new technologies.