When people started pointing out their concerns, my first reaction was dismissal and a tiny bit of frustration.
I was exhilarated I wasn’t thinking about ethics. These days, I oscillate between worrying that writing silly stories about magic and monsters is a distraction from the real-world opportunities of the software industry, and worrying that working at a FAANG makes me a corporate sellout and a colonizer.ĪI’s first steps into “creativity” felt like the long-awaited merging of my two worlds. Tech was literally getting in the way of my creativity.
When I was studying computer science at Stanford, I attempted NaNoWriMo twice but failed, overwhelmed by coursework. I have long felt like an imposter in both tech and creative circles, straddling an apparent divide between the two and feeling amateurish and outclassed by anybody who specializes in just one. In 2023, I read that tweet and felt a wave of shame so strong I reflexively hit Delete. This was before anybody in my feed started talking about the dark side of AI, before I heard critics point out that AI generators are trained on stolen artwork, before it occurred to me that synthetic art could be theft. The post was part of a trend going around the Twitter writing community: using an AI art generator to create fanart for your book. It was a graphic of a psychedelic-looking motorcycle on a wasteland background, captioned with a breathless declaration: AI art is awesome! Until I came across a post from late 2021 that stopped me cold.
So I went trawling through my tweet history, smiling at old pitches and snippets, riding a wave of happy nostalgia. Along with this victory came an urge to look back on the path that led me here-a path I can more-or-less trace through Twitter, ever since I joined the creative community there a few years ago. My debut fantasy novel sold to a publisher my words will soon be packaged behind a pretty cover and shared with the world.
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