AI-generated profiles impersonating people with Down syndrome and other disabilities are increasing on social media, according to a CBS News Confirmed investigation. Many of these AI-powered profiles are acquiring followers faster than real disability advocates, and they’re profiting from it. These fake accounts send out positive messages, dance to popular songs, and thank their followers for their support.
Down syndrome is caused by chromosome 21 trisomy; it is one of the most well-known chromosomal disorders in humans. It affects most body systems, resulting in various clinical symptoms such as intellectual disability, small stature, flat face, flat nasal bridge, pronounced epicanthic folds, up slanting palpebral fissures, and a protruding tongue.
Down syndrome is also linked to a higher chance of developing other medical issues. Common comorbidities in individuals with Down syndrome include heart defects, sleep apnea, and leukemia. Individuals with Down syndrome have varying degrees of intellectual disability ranging from mild to severe.
For people with Down syndrome, these fake accounts feel like a new form of discrimination, with their actual experiences copied, exaggerated, and exploited. “It’s not right to steal our stories just to get attention online,” said Alex Bolden. Bolden has Down syndrome and works for the National Down Syndrome Society. He told CBS News that he has spent years attempting to gain his 24,000 Instagram followers, which some impersonators have done in only a few months.
Last week, at their annual advocacy conference in Washington, D.C., many advocates agreed that only people with Down syndrome should be allowed to tell their stories.”While there are many reasons why these fake accounts are wrong, the principle here is that individuals with Down syndrome are the only people who should be speaking about what it’s like to have Down syndrome,” NDSS President & CEO Kandi Pickard told CBS News.
AI-generated social media accounts take away opportunities for disabled people to tell their own stories. Social media can be a powerful tool for people to raise awareness of their disabilities. However, AI is not an effective storytelling platform, and could also perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
According to researchers at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), artificial intelligence is driven by learned associations that frequently contain biases toward disabled people. “We wanted to examine if the nature of a discussion or an NLP (natural language processing) model’s learned associations contributed to disability bias,” said Pranav Narayanan Venkit, a PhD student at the College of IST and the paper’s first author. “This is important because real-world organizations that outsource their AI needs may unknowingly deploy biased models.”
Stopping the proliferation of AI-generated accounts is a challenge, because even if one is removed, another might appear. Sadly, these accounts overshadow true advocates.
Sources:
Clark , Alex. “Why People Are Using AI to Fake Disabilities like Down Syndrome Online.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 6 May 2024, http://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ai-fake-disabilities-down-syndrome-social-media/.
Fetzer, Mary. “Trained AI Models Exhibit Learned Disability Bias, IST Researchers Say.” Penn State University, Penn State University, 30 Nov. 2023, http://www.psu.edu/news/information-sciences-and-technology/story/trained-ai-models-exhibit-learned-disability-bias-ist.
MacLennan, Sarah. ‘Down’s Syndrome’. InnovAiT, vol. 13, no. 1, SAGE Publications, Jan. 2020, pp. 47–52, https://doi.org10.1177/1755738019886612.
Narayanan Venkit, Pranav, et al. ‘Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Models’. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2023), edited by Anaelia Ovalle et al., Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023, pp. 26–34, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.trustnlp-1.3.
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