ArtistHighlight Feature
I made it into another publication!!! Both celebrating my achievements as a disabled artist- but I'm glad that for this article, we could talk more about AI.
See, when I talk about how AI doesn’t benefit artists, there’s always someone who pipes up with:
“Okay but what about disabled artists?”
So let’s talk about disabled artists. Real ones. Historically documented ones.
People have painted with their mouths and feet long before digital tools existed.
Blind people have memorized epics, have composed music, played instruments, written poetry, and shaped oral history for centuries.
One of the most famous composers is a deaf man.
Disability has never meant the absence of creativity.
Take Francisco Goya.
He became profoundly deaf later in life, after illness. His disability didn’t make him stop creating, but it did change his work. His paintings were a lot darker, more political, more brutal. That wasn’t technology “fixing” him. That was a disabled artist adapting on his own terms, using tools he already controlled.
Take Frida Kahlo.
Disabled by polio as a child. Severely injured in a bus accident. Chronic pain for the rest of her life. She even painted from her bed, in corsets, with mirrors mounted above her. Her work is inseparable from her lived experience: her body, her pain, her culture, her politics.
She didn’t need a machine to replace her authorship. She needed access, time, and autonomy.
And here’s the part people conveniently ignore:
Disabled artists are not asking for our labour to be automated.
We are asking for: accessible tools, fair pay, time to work at our own pace, accommodations that don’t strip us of authorship
And most importantly....systems that don’t exploit us
AI companies didn’t build these tools with disabled artists.
They built them by scraping our work without consent, then turned around and used our disability as a PR shield.
Don’t use disabled artists to justify systems that erase artists.
Especially when so many of us are saying, very clearly:
This doesn’t help us.
From the article:
"One of the most striking aspects of The Sixth Sun is the fact that every piece of it, every word, every illustration, every voice, all the music, and even animation is created by human hands. In an era where AI-generated art is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, Roscoe’s project stands as a conscious act of resistance against the rise of automation in creative fields. “This project is about human connection,” she explains. “From the voice acting to the concept art, every aspect of The Sixth Sun is created by people who are passionate about the work. No AI. Just humans telling a story. The Sixth Sun celebrates that creative spark we have”
