How ChatGPT Could Help or Hurt Students With Disabilities

User-friendly artificial-intelligence tools like ChatGPT are new enough that professors aren’t yet sure how they will shape teaching and learning. That uncertainty holds doubly true for how the technology could affect students with disabilities. On the one hand, these tools can function like personal assistants: Ask ChatGPT to create a study schedule, simplify a complex idea, or suggest topics for a research paper, and it can do that. That could be a boon for students who have trouble managing their time, processing information, or ordering their thoughts. On the other hand, fears about cheating could lead professors to make changes in testing and assessment that could hurt students unable to do well on, say, an oral exam or in-class test. And instead of using it as a simple study aid, students who lack confidence in their ability to learn might allow the products of these AI tools to replace their own voices or ideas.