1 day Ago By Andrea Jiménez
Theron Pierce has never held a job long enough to get promoted and struggles to connect with people at work. Ten months into a gig teaching cello lessons at an after-school programme in Canada, Pierce felt like they were thriving in the job. Then a layoff notice came.
Embarrassed and hurt, 34-year-old Pierce, who has autism , said they struggled to understand why they’d been let go. So they turned to the Autistic Translator, an AI tool where you type in a situation you’re trying to understand, and it gives the unspoken nuances of social situations. After describing their situation, the translator generated a response: in bullet points, the AI told Pierce how their persistent questions and search for feedback were interpreted by their supervisors as incompetence.
“It was kind of eye-opening for me,” Pierce said. Reading feedback from an AI devoid of any human expression or emotion made the information easier to process, Pierce said..
