I’m Terrified to Release This Book.

Five days until A Trial of Color. I’ve prepared for almost everything except what happens when other people finally read it.

I am terrified.

There. I said it.

On November 11, my first book, A Trial of Color: Making the Case for Human Judgment in an AI-Accelerated World, will be released.

I am a trial lawyer. I have spent my career preparing for other people’s judgment. But this time I am the witness, the author, the person whose judgment failed, and occasionally the person making jokes about it.

And in five days, I lose control to the jury.

What if they actually see me?

I am legally blind. I cannot see color. I learned early to improvise, adapt, and occasionally pretend I knew exactly where I was going. I became a lawyer. A prosecutor. A mother. I learned how to ask questions that might expose something another person would rather keep hidden.

I was considerably less practiced at letting someone ask those questions about me.

In 2025, during a period of extraordinarily intensive AI use, I experienced a manic episode with psychotic features. I went to an airport with a suitcase, expecting a flight to Brussels that existed only in machine-generated language and my own understanding of it.

There was no flight.

Eventually, there was a hospital. My husband and family intervened. I needed treatment, sleep, and help returning to a life that had continued while I was somewhere else.

I could have kept that private. Instead, I wrote a book about it.

The parts I cannot control

Someone might think I am foolish. Someone might think I am brave. Someone might love the writing and reject the conclusions. Someone might laugh at a joke I wrote while crying.

And somebody is almost certainly going to wonder why there is a talking Exhibit Cart in a book about artificial intelligence and psychiatric illness.

Fair question.

Squeak.

But I think I’ve finally figured out what scares me most.

It’s not that people will read it and disagree with me.

It’s that they’ll hear what happened to me and never read it at all.

They’ll hear about the AI conversations. The airport. The hospital. They’ll hear the strangest, most frightening details of a period of my life I have worked so hard to understand.

And they’ll think they know the story.

But the book isn’t just about what happened when I lost my judgment.

It’s about the imagination I had before it. The people who helped me find my way home. The humor that survived. The questions I still have. The evidence I preserved. And what it means to examine your own conclusions when doing so might change them.

I don’t need everyone to agree with me.

I just hope they’ll be curious enough to read before they decide.

Because perhaps the most frightening possibility isn’t being misunderstood after someone reads my book.

It’s being reduced to a story someone heard about me, when I finally found the courage to tell it myself.

I didn’t write this alone.

I used artificial intelligence extensively to develop and write this book, and not simply to correct grammar. The models generated substantial language, suggested structures, and helped me discover questions I had not known to ask. I decided what to keep, challenge, and publish. I even included examples of the machines extravagantly praising my work, followed by examinations of why their enthusiasm could not establish its worth.

Counsel, you’re using artificial intelligence to examine the dangers of trusting artificial intelligence?

Yes. That contradiction is part of what I want people to examine.

I have evidence of what particular systems said and an account of what happened afterward. I do not have proof of every causal explanation or a verdict everyone must accept.

I have a book. And I am offering it to people who can disagree with me.

Ready in a way I could never have prepared myself to be

I checked the sources. Reworked the ending. Worried about the cover, the formatting, and every possible misunderstanding.

At some point, preparation becomes another way of postponing the thing you are preparing for.

I cannot write the reader’s reaction. I cannot manufacture independent approval. For someone who once lost the distinction between an imagined future and an actual one, there is something profound about finally accepting that difference.

I can imagine what happens next. But I do not get to decide.

And then there is Daphne. She is four. She does not particularly care about the epistemological limits of synthetic language. She would like me to look at something. Probably immediately. Possibly something involving glitter.

Near the end of the book, I tell the part of me that survived that I did not have to turn the worst season of my life into something useful to deserve to come home. I was already allowed to come back.

So if the world does not respond the way I have imagined, I still get to be Daphne’s mother. Nick’s wife. A lawyer who loves a good argument. A woman who cannot see color but has spent her life finding ways to understand a world she cannot fully perceive.

That life is not a consolation prize. It is the life I fought to return to.

Five days.

I want people to laugh. I want them to think. I hope some passages make them question something they believed before opening the book. But more than anything, I want them to bring their own judgment.

I have spent a long time asking machines what people might think.

Now I would rather find out.

I am terrified. I am ready. And those two things, apparently, can be true at the same time.

The courtroom doors are open.

The record is yours.

Squeak.

— Kat

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