AI study

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Why accessibility might be AI’s biggest breakthrough

Accessibility, ADHD, AI, AI accessibility, AI and work, AI assistants, AI evaluation, AI study, Biz & IT, Department for Business and Trade, disability, dyslexia, M365 Copilot, machine learning, microsoft, neurodiversity, uk government, workplace accommodation / /

For those with visual impairments, language models can summarize visual content and reformat information. Tools like ChatGPT’s voice mode with video and Be My Eyes allow a machine to describe real-world visual scenes in ways that were impossible just a few years ago.

AI language tools may be providing unofficial stealth accommodations for students—support that doesn’t require formal diagnosis, workplace disclosure, or special equipment. Yet this informal support system comes with its own risks. Language models do confabulate—the UK Department for Business and Trade study found 22 percent of users identified false information in AI outputs—which could be particularly harmful for users relying on them for essential support.

When AI assistance becomes dependence

Beyond the workplace, the drawbacks may have a particular impact on students who use the technology. The authors of a 2025 study on students with disabilities using generative AI cautioned, “Key concerns students with disabilities had included the inaccuracy of AI answers, risks to academic integrity, and subscription cost barriers,” they wrote. Students in that study had ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autism, with ChatGPT being the most commonly used tool.

Mistakes in AI outputs are especially pernicious because, due to grandiose visions of near-term AI technology, some people think today’s AI assistants can perform tasks that are actually far outside their scope. As research on blind users’ experiences suggested, people develop complex (sometimes flawed) mental models of how these tools work, showing the need for higher awareness of AI language model drawbacks among the general public.

For the UK government employees who participated in the initial study, these questions moved from theoretical to immediate when the pilot ended in December 2024. After that time, many participants reported difficulty readjusting to work without AI assistance—particularly those with disabilities who had come to rely on the accessibility benefits. The department hasn’t announced the next steps, leaving users in limbo. When participants report difficulty readjusting to work without AI while productivity gains remain marginal, accessibility emerges as potentially the first AI application with irreplaceable value.

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AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests

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Using AI can be a double-edged sword, according to new research from Duke University. While generative AI tools may boost productivity for some, they might also secretly damage your professional reputation.

On Thursday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study showing that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at work face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers.

“Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools: Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs,” write researchers Jessica A. Reif, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

The Duke team conducted four experiments with over 4,400 participants to examine both anticipated and actual evaluations of AI tool users. Their findings, presented in a paper titled “Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI,” reveal a consistent pattern of bias against those who receive help from AI.

What made this penalty particularly concerning for the researchers was its consistency across demographics. They found that the social stigma against AI use wasn’t limited to specific groups.

Fig. 1. Effect sizes for differences in expected perceptions and disclosure to others (Study 1). Note: Positive d values indicate higher values in the AI Tool condition, while negative d values indicate lower values in the AI Tool condition. N = 497. Error bars represent 95% CI. Correlations among variables range from | r |= 0.53 to 0.88.

Fig. 1 from the paper “Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI.” Credit: Reif et al.

“Testing a broad range of stimuli enabled us to examine whether the target’s age, gender, or occupation qualifies the effect of receiving help from Al on these evaluations,” the authors wrote in the paper. “We found that none of these target demographic attributes influences the effect of receiving Al help on perceptions of laziness, diligence, competence, independence, or self-assuredness. This suggests that the social stigmatization of AI use is not limited to its use among particular demographic groups. The result appears to be a general one.”

The hidden social cost of AI adoption

In the first experiment conducted by the team from Duke, participants imagined using either an AI tool or a dashboard creation tool at work. It revealed that those in the AI group expected to be judged as lazier, less competent, less diligent, and more replaceable than those using conventional technology. They also reported less willingness to disclose their AI use to colleagues and managers.

The second experiment confirmed these fears were justified. When evaluating descriptions of employees, participants consistently rated those receiving AI help as lazier, less competent, less diligent, less independent, and less self-assured than those receiving similar help from non-AI sources or no help at all.

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Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average

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It’s worth clarifying that AI models did not generate the images used in the study. Instead, researchers used popular, pre-existing meme templates, and GPT-4o or human participants generated captions for them.

More memes, not better memes

When crowdsourced participants rated the memes, those created entirely by AI models scored higher on average in humor, creativity, and shareability. The researchers defined shareability as a meme’s potential to be widely circulated, influenced by humor, relatability, and relevance to current cultural topics. They note that this study is among the first to show AI-generated memes outperforming human-created ones across these metrics.

However, the study comes with an important caveat. On average, fully AI-generated memes scored higher than those created by humans alone or humans collaborating with AI. But when researchers looked at the best individual memes, humans created the funniest examples, and human-AI collaborations produced the most creative and shareable memes. In other words, AI models consistently produced broadly appealing memes, but humans—with or without AI help—still made the most exceptional individual examples.

Diagrams of meme creation and evaluation workflows taken from the paper.

Diagrams of meme creation and evaluation workflows taken from the paper. Credit: Wu et al.

The study also found that participants using AI assistance generated significantly more meme ideas and described the process as easier and requiring less effort. Despite this productivity boost, human-AI collaborative memes did not rate higher on average than memes humans created alone. As the researchers put it, “The increased productivity of human-AI teams does not lead to better results—just to more results.”

Participants who used AI assistance reported feeling slightly less ownership over their creations compared to solo creators. Given that a sense of ownership influenced creative motivation and satisfaction in the study, the researchers suggest that people interested in using AI should carefully consider how to balance AI assistance in creative tasks.

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