Contributor: Stop shaming the use of AI. For some with disabilities, it's a godsend - Los Angeles Times
Contributor: Stop shaming the use of AI. For some with disabilities, it's a godsend - Los Angeles Times
摘要: By
Sharon Schindel
Guest contributor
Aug. 20, 2026
3:17 AM PT
Click here to listen to this article
Share via
Close extra sharing options
正文
Sharon Schindel
Guest contributor
Aug. 20, 2026
3:17 AM PT
Click here to listen to this article
Share via
Close extra sharing options
Copy Link URL
Copied!
This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies
.
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.
Set us as preferred
As a longtime Angeleno, I’ve got the same beef with AI as everyone else in this town. I don’t want it stealing stories from writers, voices from actors or trust from audiences.
But the condemnation of artificial intelligence has now blown past scripts, scraping and unscrupulous studios. Earlier this month, New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens begged readers
never to write with AI
— not even to organize notes. It’s “mentally enfeebling,” he wrote, “an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.”
Not everyone can take the stairs.
I’m a freelance writer with shredded tendons, a wrist tear and nerve compression that sets my arm on fire after only a few minutes of using a pen, keyboard, mouse or trackpad. So I dictate everything instead — this sentence, flowery Yelp reviews I never post, texts to myself reminding me to set timers, and timers reminding me to send texts.
Advertisement
I write clean but talk dirty, and dictation means it all lands on the page — the intended prose, the unintended profanity, the inevitable parentheticals and the “Who’s a good boy?” when my cursing summons Walter the anxious labradoodle into my office with his giant squeaky Xanax pill toy.
The result is pages of unpunctuated chaos.
I use AI to clean up the dictation debris — the cursing, the editing commands, the typos you get when you swap a keyboard for a microphone and “raise the stakes” becomes “raise the steaks.” It does not write. It cuts. Nothing is added. What remains is only what came out of my mouth — a marginal