I am sorry if this ignorant but in my country there’s a common belief that autistic adult people cannot develop adult brain, many times on TV they showed us these type of autistic people who their brain stop developing but after seeing so many autistic on social media I found out that I may had misinformation ever since I was a kid.. I could not found helpful articles because of the lack of awareness here so if it’s ok to ask you why do people share this kind of info and how true it is ?? Going through social media I came with the idea that there was some misunderstanding about this.
Hey anon, glad you seem to be seeking information. That is... yeah. Definitely a no. There are of course, many other disorders that can happen alongside autism, just as they can happen with non-autistic people, and those can be of course a challenge, but that doesn’t mean that is the reality of every autistic person, or that those people should be infantilized either. On the contrary, really.
Just to give you my personal experience, I grew up autistic and I didn’t even know it until one year ago, so that might tell you something. I’ve graduated highschool and I have a degree in Architecture and Urbanism. Nowadays I am an English teacher, and I also work with translation, design, publication and selling of books. A lot of autistic people work in very complex industries that take care of things such as infrastructure, health (like vaccines!), technological development, and so on. Others don’t. Others teach, others are amazing artists, others live an academic life, others like working with their hands. That doesn’t mean one is more developed than the other, we’re just different people with different interests, same as anyone.
This is a very complex subject and I can give you two wonderful channels to get you started if you really want to learn more: Chloé Hayden and Paige Layle who have tons of research on those things.
From my own dedicated research, the central (summarized!!!) points I can give you are these: there are two main reasons (and a consequence), as of my understanding, for why people believe that autistics are only children, that we “disappear” when we grow up, or as you said, that we stay stuck in a childish mental age.
The first one is that most referenced, known, and used studies for autism are still ones that were done decades ago. Back then, professionals thought only young male (white) boys could be autistic, so all of the stablished research for autism is based on how a very specific demographic could behave, or react, or present the disorder. So if we’re talking about a whole rainbow spectrum, we’ve only ever studied one shade of one color and one length of that color, and nothing else. That’s also the only image that’s ever been projected for people on media, so whenever anyone thinks autism, they think of the caricature of the young white boy who’s nerdy and quiet and lonely and prone to outbursts if upset.
The second problem is that a LOT of the organizations who claim to study autism to help autistic people, are run by non autistics that have no interests in helping adult autistics, or listening to us, and actually just keep looking for ways to either get rid of it (which would be like trying to get rid of my bisexuality, or the color of my skin) OR they’re trying to identify all of the genetics so they can stop us from being born at all by identifying autism in the womb (eugenics).
The consequence of those things, and of the fact that many autistics have different ways of communicating (like non-verbal autistics, who would communicate via text or other means), means that the people who are actually represented when talking about autism are the non-autistic parents of autistic children. They are the ones the studies, the organizations, the aid etc are meant to help. The parents. And parents have to parent children, not adults. So any articles, any programs to help, any government aid, it’s all aimed at the parents, as though like I said, children grew out of their autism eventually (impossible), or as though, like you said, we didn’t grow up at all. There is a major focus on autism as a burden for the poor neurotypical parents who can’t understand their child, while ignoring the autistic person themselves.
Yes, there are many of us who have more special needs than others, and those should be respected, there are as I’ve said, co-conditions that can occur, there are a lot of us, as I’ve mentioned, that have difficulty speaking up or speaking verbally at all, but not being able to communicate what is on your mind in a way that is comfortable for non-autistic people doesn’t make your mind underdeveloped. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be listened to when decisions are made about your own life, it doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish whatever you want to do with accommodations, and it doesn’t mean you can’t understand the world around you or have amazing talents, or just want to sit on your couch and watch tv and have a regular job.
We’re people of all kinds because we’re people. We have different needs, and only the people who have them can tell you about that, I could never speak for them, I can only speak of my own needs. But you can research more and learn the nuances I could never put into a singular answer. That’s the gist of it. I hope you do continue to learn! And I wish luck to autistics in your country, I’m sure there are many more of them than you imagine, and there must be communities over there too, because we exist all over the world, and we definitely don’t stop existing or become neurotypicals at 18 years old.
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I'm seeing some frustration over fandom creatives expressing anger or distress over people feeding their work into ChatGPT. I'm not responding to OP directly because I don't want to derail their post (their intent was to provide perspective on how these models actually work, and reduce undue panic, which is all coming from a good place!), but reassurances that the addition of our work will have a negligible impact on the model (which is true at this point) does kind of miss the point? Speaking for myself, my distress is less about the practical ramifications of feeding my fic into ChatGPT, and more about the principle of someone taking my work and deliberately adding it to the dataset.
Like, I fully realize that my work is a drop in the bucket of ChatGPT's several-billion-token training set! It will not make a demonstrable practical difference in the output of the model! That doesn't change the fact that I do not want my work to be part of the set of data that the ChatGPT devs use for training.
According to their FAQ, ChatGPT can and will use user input to train itself. The terms and conditions explicitly state that they save your chats to help train and improve their models. (You can opt-out, but sharing is the default.) So if you're feeding a fic into ChatGPT, unless you've explicitly opted out, you are handing it to the ChatGPT team and giving them permission to use it for training, whether or not that was your intent.
Now, will one fic make a demonstrable difference in the output of the model? No! But as the person who spent a year and a handful of months laboring over my fic, it makes a difference to me whether my fic, specifically, is being used in the dataset. If authors are allowed to have a problem with the ChatGPT devs for scraping millions of fics without permission, they're also allowed to have a problem with folks handing their individual fics over via the chat interface.
I do want to add that if you've done this to a fic, please don't take this as me being upset with you personally! Folks are still learning new information and puzzling out what "good" vs. "bad" use is, from an ethical standpoint. (Heck, my own perspective on this is deeply based on my own subjective feelings!) And we certainly shouldn't act like one person feeding a fic into ChatGPT has the same practical negative impact, on a broad societal scale, as a team using a web crawler to scrape five billion pieces of artwork for Stable Diffusion.
The point is that fundamentally, an ethical dataset should be obtained with the consent of those providing the data. Just because it's normalized for our data to be scraped without consent doesn't make it ethical, and this is why ChatGPT gives users the option to not share data— there is actually a standardized way (robots.txt) for website servers to set policies for how bots/crawlers can interact with them, for exactly this reason— and I think fandom artists and authors are well within their rights to express a desire for opting out to be the socially-respected default within the fandom community.
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Political ads: My opponent has jacked up taxes every year since he was elected!
Me: Which taxes? Income? Sales? Property? Business?
Political ads: I promise to hold the line on taxes!
Me: Which taxes? What government programs do those taxes contribute to? What gets cut if the lack of taxation causes a deficit?
Political ads: Think about the taxes!
Me: WHICH TAXES. WHICH TAXES ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. TELL ME WHO'S ACTUALLY GETTING AFFECTED BY THESE TAXES YOU'RE SO CONCERNED WITH.
Reminder to always ask what it is that people aren't saying in these ads.
A lot of them want you to think that it is your personal taxes as a working-class person that they're talking about. But if it's taxes on the rich that they're "holding the line on," then they're using your desire to survive with a greater portion of your own income as fuel to keep the upper classes from paying their fair share.
I keep getting the same three or four political ads (half aren't even for the district I live in) and I'm frustrated that they use these transparent tactics and that there are probably people that don't have the time or background to take that moment to go 'what are they hoping I hear in this? What are they actually going to do?'
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Teaching French to English Speakers:
French lesson: The word "sur" means "on"
English speaker: Okay.
French lesson: For example,
The vase is [on] the table.
The house is [on] the right.
I read this book [on] his recommendation.
Bring me the file [on] copyright licensing.
English speaker: Right. Got it. "Sur" means "on."
.
Teaching French to Chinese speakers:
French lesson: The word "sur" means "on."
Chinese speaker: Okay.
French lesson: For example,
The vase is [on] the table
Chinese speaker: Right. Got it. "Sur" means "on."
French lesson: The word "sur" also means "towards."
Chinese speaker: Eh?
French lesson: For example,
The house is [towards] the right.
Chinese speaker: Oh...kay.
French lesson: The word "sur" also means "because of."
Chinese speaker: What? H..how? What?
French lesson: For example,
I read this book [because of] his recommendation.
Chinese speaker: Why does this one word mean all these things? Don't y'all have any other words?
French lesson: The word "sur" also means "containing information pertaining to."
Chinese speaker: Stop fucking around with me.
French lesson: For example,
Bring me the file [containing information pertaining to] copyright licensing.
Chinese speaker: What the fuck is wrong with this language?
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It always grinds my gears when a writer doesn't seem to have any love for human beings. Everyone is inhospitable, or too stupid to function, or too much a stock archetype to develop in any meaningful way. Not because I personally think that human beings are intrinsically good ("good" is a useless designation for real people anyways) but because real human beings have the fucking range.
Most people aren't going to be inhospitable to random strangers, because that's not a useful way to live your life--being needlessly cruel is a good way to get your shit pushed in. If someone is being stupid about one thing, chances are there's something else they know a lot about, because nobody is blanket bad at everything. And of course most people are going to subtly contradict any stock archetypes they're assigned.
That's not to say that people can't be cruel and stupid and predictable; it's just that they're kind and intelligent and chaotic in equal measure, and when I see a writer forgetting that, it frustrates me, because that's good drama you're missing! You could be taking advantage of all that. And what are you doing instead? cheap bullshit. boring asf
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