I Wrote This - or Did I? Generative AI as a Key to Unlocking Neurodiverse Voices in Academia.
Generative AI didn’t replace me - it finally enabled me.
Living most of my life with undiagnosed ADHD meant that writing always felt like having a brain racing at 100kph while the world expected me to crawl. It was a struggle to get across all the things I wanted to say while trying to express them through text. That’s a common ADHD experience but I don’t think it’s a defect - rather, it’s a fundamental mismatch between how we're wired and what society demands.
Writing itself is technology – from cuneiform on clay tablets to autocorrect on an iPad, writing has always been an artificial system that attempts to capture human thought and speech. We’ve privileged this particular representation of language by constructing academic and professional worlds around the ability to translate messy, vibrant, real-time thinking into static text on a page. And understandably so, since for millennia writing was the only way to record and transmit language across space and time.
But this process isn't neutral. It inherently favours certain neurotypes while creating significant barriers for others. My ADHD means that my mind often thrives in the natural messiness of spoken language – where ideas can flow uninterrupted, where tangents are welcome, where rhythm and emphasis convey meaning as much as words themselves. Insights, arguments, and intellectual contributions can exist fully formed in spoken form, both as an internal monologue and externally as speech, but for some people are blocked and evaporate when forced to conform to standardised writing conventions. I challenge the idea that "writing is thinking"—a phrase that perpetuates a subtle form of ableism by dismissing the legitimate intellectual processes of people with neurotypes who are more adept at organising and expressing knowledge through ways other than writing.
For me, generative AI bridges this divide, freeing me from text-based writing's rigid constraints. The nuanced, collaborative process between my mind and AI doesn't merely assist my writing – it fundamentally transforms how thought becomes expression. It creates a fluid, multimodal process where my ideas can flow naturally between speech and text, reflecting the authentic rhythm of my thinking rather than forcing it into a single channel.
These are some ways that generative AI enhances my experience of writing with ADHD:
It can match my speed of thought. When ideas flow faster than my fingers can type, generative AI speech capabilities can capture and organise them before they vanish into the ether. It turns my hyper-verbal tendencies from a liability to a strength.
It translates my inner monologue into academic expression. The ideas I have in my mind and my non-standard, messy, spoken language are just as legitimate as the ones I write down, and AI helps me convert that natural speech into the formal written structures that academia demands, without losing the original insight.
It creates judgment-free space. I don’t have to deal with rejection sensitivity derailing my creative process – using AI for dialogical brainstorming and feedback offers almost unlimited iterations without the social anxiety.
It gets me past the paralysis of a blank page. Starting is often an ADHDer’s biggest hurdle. Generative AI can prevent procrastination by throwing out initial ideas and scaffolding tasks in a way that makes the intimidating first step much more manageable.
It saves me from perfectionist quicksand. I can lose hours doing minor edits to make sure my phrasing matches socially imposed formal language conventions. Using generative AI prevents hyperfocus on unproductive refinement of surface level expression leaving me to focus on substance instead. I spend more time on WHAT I’m trying to communicate rather than agonising over HOW to say it.
It transforms complexity into manageable chunks. Overwhelmingly complex projects become navigable when I use AI to break them into concrete, achievable steps. It also makes it easier to structure my ideas without getting lost in the details by giving suggestions that I can use my own evaluative judgement to either accept or decline.
It keeps things interesting. Novelty is a powerful motivator for ADHD brains, and exploring new AI tools (especially with the speed of development in the field!) can be a source of fun problem solving and creative inspiration.
I don’t see this as AI doing the work for me – it's about technology that finally adapts to how my brain naturally functions and allows me to reach my potential in a society where certain kinds of functioning and expression are privileged. We need to recognise that the medium shouldn't determine whose contributions matter. Some of history's greatest thinkers processed information through dialogue, debate, and verbal exploration and I often think about all the great neurodiverse thinkers that academia has missed out on simply because writing has acted as a gatekeeper. Generative AI now offers a bridge to bring those valuable, diverse cognitive approaches into scholarly discourse.
For those with brains that don’t suit written expression for whatever reason – be it ADHD, autism, dyslexia – or even physical differences that make writing less accessible, generative AI isn't just helpful, it can also be liberating. Just because I didn’t type out all my words with my own ten fingers it doesn’t mean that they weren’t my own original ideas. I hope that eventually we can accept that insight and intellectual work shouldn't require conformity to a single writing process or mode of expression – something that should have happened long ago, but that generative AI is now forcing us to face.
NB: I am not going to disclose if I used generative AI to write this. Instead, I want the reader to consider how the use of generative AI, or not, changes their attitude towards the content.
This post was originally published on my LinkedIn on the 19th of March, 2025