Recently, I fulfilled a childhood dream. My debut fantasy novel was sold to a publisher; my words will soon be packaged behind a pretty cover and shared with the world. 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.

So I went trawling through my tweet history, smiling at old pitches and snippets, riding a wave of happy nostalgia. Until I came across a post from late 2021 that stopped me cold.

It was a graphic of a psychedelic-looking motorcycle on a wasteland background, captioned with a breathless declaration: AI art is awesome!

The post was part of a trend going around the Twitter writing community: using an AI art generator to create fanart for your book. 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.

In 2023, I read that tweet and felt a wave of shame so strong I reflexively hit Delete