Generative AI and everyday dignity for visually impaired students in South Korea

Background

Generative AI (GenAI) is widely framed as a productivity tool. Its capacity to restructure everyday autonomy and dignity for disabled people remains underexplored. People with visual impairments often rely on sighted assistance for daily tasks, which carries psychological indebtedness, time cost, and privacy exposure. This study examines how GenAI reshapes these relational conditions of independent living.

Methods

A qualitative study was conducted with seven South Korean university students with severe visual impairments. Data were collected via focus group interviews on GenAI use in non-academic daily life. Transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Results

Four themes emerged. First, GenAI dissolved the relational cost of help-seeking — indebtedness, temporal dependency, and privacy exposure of requesting sighted help — repositioning participants as autonomous agents in routine tasks. Second, participants crossed previously impassable thresholds, including creating visual content, travelling abroad without sighted companions, and joining real-time image-based group communication. Third, participants negotiated disability identity in AI interactions: some strategically disclosed their impairment for better outputs; others resisted disclosure to feel treated as “just a regular person”, showing how disclosure fatigue extends into human-AI interaction. Fourth, these experiences converged into restored dignity, captured in one participant’s words — “I finally feel like a person” — alongside self-critical awareness of over-dependence.

Conclusions

GenAI functions not only as an assistive device but as a sociotechnical infrastructure reshaping the relational, experiential, and existential conditions of independent living for disabled people. Findings inform inclusive AI design, disability policy, and technology governance, and highlight an empowerment-dependency paradox warranting further attention.

Key messages

• GenAI is not just an assistive device: it removes the relational cost of help-seeking and restores everyday autonomy and dignity for people with visual impairments, demanding inclusive AI design.

• GenAI reshapes everyday independence and dignity for people with visual impairments. Inclusive AI design and disability policy must treat GenAI as social infrastructure, not just a tool.