There’s a phrase from Descartes that haunts me sometimes: “I think, therefore I am.” It’s tidy, reductive, and for a long time it was treated as the foundation of what makes us human. Thinking, cognition, intellect—if you can do those things, you exist. You matter.
But what happens when the machine starts to think? What happens when the “I” in the equation isn’t flesh and blood? What happens when intellect alone no longer serves as the definition of a soul? The rise of AI, of tools like ChatGPT and generative content, has brought all of this bubbling to the surface. Some argue that artificial intelligence is nothing but slop—regurgitated mimicry devoid of originality, humanity, or creativity. After all, a machine can process words, but can it feel? Does it have a ghost in its machine?
And here’s where I pause, because I recognize that argument. I’ve lived it. For as long as I’ve understood what autism is, I’ve been told that I’m “not fully human” either—not in so many words, but always in implications. Autistic people are often seen as ghosts within the machine of humanity. We’re described as freakishly brilliant but incapable of connection. Creative but broken. Logical but soulless. Mimics, not makers. Masks, not selves.
So, when I hear the debate about whether AI can ever truly create or feel, I can’t help but wonder: Where does that leave neurodivergent people? What does it mean to be human when society defines humanity by traits we struggle to embody?
Autism as an “Infected Program”
If humanity is a machine, autism is often framed as a kind of virus within its system. A distortion. A glitch. Something that makes the smooth operation of society stutter and falter. It’s not hard to see where this metaphor comes from: we interrupt conversations with blunt honesty, hyper-fixate on topics that bore everyone else, and struggle with the invisible rules of social interaction. We don’t run the way the rest of humanity’s code does.
But maybe it’s not a virus at all. Maybe it’s something more like creative slippage—an intentional error in the system. If we think of humanity as a program, autism might be the subroutine that generates new possibilities. It’s a divergence, a mutation, a creative rebellion. Instead of running the script as it’s always been written, it rewrites itself. That rewriting, though, can look messy and incomprehensible to the rest of the system. It doesn’t conform to the expected outputs. It’s misunderstood as dysfunction when it’s really evolution.
The problem isn’t the glitch; it’s the system that insists on seeing it as a flaw.
AI and the Argument About Humanity
The parallels between AI and autism are hard to ignore. Both are accused of mimicry rather than originality. Both are praised for their utility but dismissed as incapable of true understanding. AI can generate poetry, compose symphonies, and hold conversations, but critics argue it doesn’t mean any of it. It doesn’t have a soul.
And then there’s the flip side: What about people like me, who struggle to meet the emotional and social benchmarks of humanity? If I can compose a heartfelt message but struggle to look you in the eye, does that make me less human? If I can write pages of poetry but shut down in a loud, crowded room, does that mean I’m just a ghost in a human machine?
Autistic people are often accused of “masking”—of pretending to be neurotypical to fit in. We rehearse phrases, mimic body language, and script interactions to avoid being ostracized. It’s survival, but it’s also exhausting. And sometimes it makes me wonder: Am I really human, or am I just running a very convincing program?
The Soul Debate: Who Gets to Be Human?
The argument that AI is soulless is rooted in a long-standing humanist tradition that places the soul at the center of what it means to be truly human. Only humans can feel, create, suffer, love, be. Machines—no matter how advanced—are just tools. They’re external to us. But if we’re being honest, that same argument has been used to dehumanize countless groups throughout history. Women, enslaved people, the disabled, and yes, neurodivergent people have all been dismissed as less-than-human for failing to fit into society’s narrow definition of what a soul looks like.
And isn’t that the real issue? We’ve tied humanity to a set of traits that are neither universal nor eternal. Empathy, social intuition, creative genius—these are all subjective benchmarks. If AI threatens those definitions, maybe it’s because they were never as fixed as we thought.
But what if we let go of the idea that the soul is a singular, human-exclusive concept? What if, instead, we saw it as something more fragmented, more collective? A mosaic of experiences, contributions, and connections. Autistic people might struggle with social intuition, but we often excel at building systems, spotting patterns, and creating art. AI might not feel in the way we do, but it can amplify human creativity and generate new ideas. Maybe the ghost in the machine isn’t an individual soul—it’s all of us, together, weaving something bigger than ourselves.
What It Means to Be Human
To be human is to wrestle with questions of meaning and identity. It’s to live with the tension between order and chaos, logic and emotion, individuality and community. Autistic people embody that tension in a way that feels raw and unresolved. We’re logical but emotional. Creative but rigid. Connected but alienated. We defy easy categorization—and in that way, we are deeply, profoundly human.
AI doesn’t have that tension. It doesn’t wrestle with identity or morality. It doesn’t yearn. That’s what makes it a tool rather than a being. But it’s a tool that reflects us, amplifies us, and holds up a mirror to our humanity. If anything, AI forces us to ask the questions we’ve avoided for too long: What defines a soul? Who gets to be human? What happens when the line between creator and creation blurs?
Final Thoughts: The Future of Ghosts
The ghost in the machine isn’t just a metaphor for AI. It’s a metaphor for all of us—autistic people, neurotypical people, creators, thinkers, dreamers. We are all haunted by the need to define ourselves, to prove our worth, to assert that we matter in a system that doesn’t always acknowledge us.
But maybe the ghost isn’t something to exorcise. Maybe it’s the very thing that makes us human. It’s the slippage, the distortion, the creative rebellion that keeps the system from stagnating. Whether we’re autistic individuals struggling to navigate a neurotypical world or machines generating poetry that we insist must be soulless, the ghost is what reminds us to keep asking, keep creating, and keep evolving.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s what the soul really is. Not a fixed trait or a rigid definition, but a question. A yearning. A glitch that refuses to be erased.
