When Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live in May 2021, he told the audience he was the first person with Asperger's syndrome to do so, then added that he is "pretty good at running human emulation mode." It was a joke about masking, the effortful performance of neurotypical behavior that many autistic adults describe. Five years on, it reads like a description of a now-familiar fixture in most of our lives: chatbots. Spend time talking with one, and soon you notice the flat affect, the literalism, the faux bonhomie, not to mention its encyclopedic level of recall.
You’re left with a feeling that something is just a little off. It’s no wonder, you might observe, that an artificial intelligence tool developed by an industry renowned for its glut of talent on the autistic spectrum, be they coders or mathematicians or CEOs, has given us a product that is itself the ultimate autist. One blogger with a psychology background, Lynn Clemens, even set out to diagnose ChatGPT with autism, prompted by how many of her autistic friends loved using it.
Autistic writers have noted, with some irony, that these systems display traits they recognize in themselves, things like pattern detection, literalism, and low tolerance for ambiguity. In a Reddit space dedicated to vibecoding, one user started a thread describing AI as "AaaS," or "autism as a service," a play on the IT world’s acronym SaaS, meaning software as a service. One autistic commenter described working with AI as "like a mirror." It’s a resemblance that also does real damage.
One recent study claimed that writing by "likely-autistic authors" was significantly more likely to be flagged as AI-generated. An autistic Purdue professor was accused of being a bot over an email judged to lack warmth. This pull toward calling AI autistic is understandable—if a little cruel, given the stereotyping of autistic people as robotic—and some of it comes from autistic people themselves.
If anything, psychopathy, a very different condition from autism, is a more accurate comparison for AI, if we are using the lens of human psychology. But even that isn’t a neat fit. A review published in Frontiers in Psychology in March argues that autism starts in perception rather than sociability—and that perception is something a body builds.
A baby learns what things are by reaching for them, turning to look, and correcting itself each time the world answers back differently than expected. Autism involves differences in that loop: in how a child moves, how the senses take things in, and how the two are timed together. The clue is there in infancy.
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