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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how autistic individuals negotiate AI. Having had their moral personhood historically challenged, responses are polarized: some find kinship with chatbots; others fear further invalidation. This tension demands critical examination of atypical personhood in a transhuman age.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how the increasing visibility of AI destabilizes and redefines 'what it means to be human' in a polarised world. Rooted in a critical disability justice framework, the research examines how autistic individuals, whose personhood is often marginalised by neurotypical standards, navigate the blurring boundaries of the transhuman condition presented by AI companions.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with autistic communities in Northern Ireland and digital communities for chatbot companionship, the work is framed by theories of dehumanization (Haslam 2006; Bain et al. 2013) and contemporary autistic scholarship (Williams 2025). The analysis critically engages anthropological debates on neurodiversity (Grinker 2007; Solomon 2010; Bagatell 2010, 2017) and the anthropology of AI (Richardson 2018). I analyse how the mechanistic dehumanization of autistic people, such as cultural tropes labeling them as 'robotic', can establish cognitive alignments that can make AI appealing as forms of companionship. For some respondents, the AI chatbot is a source of kinship, offering a predictable, non-judgemental space to unmask.

Conversely, the paper addresses polarisation by also considering respondents who actively reject or fear AI's rapid cognitive development. For them, AI threatens to supplant or invalidate atypical forms of thinking, positioning the technology as a new, unattainable benchmark of cognitive validity.

By analysing both AI allegiance and rejection, this work reveals how new technologies amplify existing anxieties over intelligence, belonging, and the right to be recognized as a thinking subject, significantly contributing to anthropological studies of AI, transhumanism and contested cognitive difference.