This page maps our work on AI. We build with these tools carefully and name what they are: not neutral, not magic, and not a replacement for the communities whose knowledge this site holds. Our stance runs through every page below — human-led, community-grounded, counter-deficit, and clear-eyed about the systems of power AI is built inside.
If you came here to ask the site a question, that experiment now lives at Ask — the Spider in the Garden.
🤝 AI Collaboration at Stimpunks
How we work with generative AI, and the guardrails we hold. AI helps generate possibilities; humans decide what belongs. This page names the systems of power up front, sets out our principles — human-led, transparent, community-grounded — and explains why our standard for text differs from our restriction on AI-generated art. Start here if you want to know what we actually do and why.
⚖️ AI, Disability Justice, and the Ethics of Making
The deeper argument: from engineered exclusion to designed dignity — and who holds the tools. Harm reduction over absolution. The double empathy problem rendered in code. Co-design as a political demand, not a strategy. Disability and access are the primary frame, not an afterthought, and the page sits honestly with the tensions that follow.
🧭 AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks
A companion page that maps our guidelines against outside work — academic papers, policy frameworks, criticism, and essays. Every entry uses the same frame: where the external work converges with our practice, and where it stops short. The place to see how our position holds up against the wider conversation.
🔍 Evaluating Relational AI Tools
The questions we ask before trusting a relational AI tool — the kind that asks you to rehearse intimacy, conflict, and vulnerability with a simulated partner. Five of them: does it reinforce neuronormativity, encourage masking, affirm neurodivergence, invite anthropomorphization, or swap sycophancy for a correction mechanism calibrated to non-autistic norms? Built for a general audience, with the harms named plainly — a tool that helps an Autistic person practice until they pass is reinforcing masking, and masking carries documented links to burnout and suicidality. We hold our own experiments to the same five questions.
🕸️ Ask — The Spider in the Garden
Our experiment in knowledge gardening: a generative tool scoped to this site’s own corpus rather than the open internet. Not an oracle — a guide. A spider that walks the trails of the garden, carries our voice as far as the gate, and then steps aside. It offers useful cognitive accessibility to the encyclopedia, and every answer it gives is one click from a human-authored page. Still in testing; read laterally and follow the link.
🧵 Monotropic AI
The crosswalk where our theory runs the other way down the pipe. AI researchers took monotropism — built by Murray, Lesser, and Lawson to describe Autistic cognition — and used it as an engineering principle for “bounded competence,” a model that knows what it doesn’t know. A point Autistic communities have been making for twenty years, reached from the opposite direction.
Different pages, one commitment: broken systems, not broken people — including the systems we build with.
