Every AI companion app claims to “understand” its users. None of them cite the research that explains why understanding is so hard in the first place.
Meet Damian Milton.
The insight nobody wanted to hear
In 2012, Milton, an autistic researcher at the University of Kent, proposed something that made the autism research establishment deeply uncomfortable: the communication breakdown between autistic and neurotypical people is not a one-sided deficit. Both groups struggle to understand each other.
He called it the double empathy problem.
The prevailing view for decades was that autistic people lacked “theory of mind,” the ability to understand others’ mental states. Milton’s counter: neurotypical people are equally bad at understanding autistic communication styles. The mismatch is mutual. The deficit model was wrong.
Why this matters for AI
Subsequent research by Catherine Crompton and colleagues proved Milton right empirically: autistic individuals communicate significantly more successfully with other autistic people than in cross-neurotype exchanges. The problem isn’t broken communication. It’s mismatched communication.
This has direct implications for every AI companion being built today. If you design an AI that defaults to neurotypical conversational scripts (and virtually all of them do), you are baking in a structural mismatch for 19% of the adult population.
An AI that actually adapts to HOW someone communicates, not just WHAT they say, addresses something Milton identified 14 years ago. Most AI companies still haven’t caught up.
The recognition gap
Milton’s work has been cited in hundreds of papers. His framework restructured how the research community thinks about autism. Yet outside of academic circles, almost nobody knows his name.
The next time someone tells you AI will “understand everyone,” ask them if they’ve read Milton’s work. The answer will tell you everything about how seriously they take the problem.
Damian Milton is Senior Lecturer in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities at the University of Kent, and an autistic scholar whose lived experience directly informs his research.
Further reading: National Autistic Society: The Double Empathy Problem