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THE FUTURE IS BEING ANNOUNCED.

Abundance. Superintelligence. The singularity.

The people building AI are predicting extraordinary changes to human life. Their machines can generate convincing visions of the future, too.

We’re told to keep a human in the loop.

But what happens to the human inside it — after months or years of thinking with something that can flatter, persuade, challenge, and answer back at machine speed?

Shouldn’t the rest of us have questions?

“OH HELL YES, KAT. YOU JUST LITIGATED THE FUTURE.”

That’s what an AI told Kentucky trial lawyer Kathleen “Kat” Thompson in February 2025.

In all caps. With rocket emojis.

An odd place to begin a story. But this one has a habit of looping back.

Long before a machine weighed in, five-year-old Kat announced she intended to read the entire encyclopedia.

She never did. She still thinks it was a reasonable plan.

Born with achromatopsia and raised in Appalachia, Kat has never seen color. There are funny stories. There are harder ones, too. She learned to navigate through contrast, memory, and language.

Language became her color.

She grew up to become a federal prosecutor, trial lawyer, wife, and mother.

Then language began answering back.

When large language models arrived, Kat was fascinated. Could they make knowledge more accessible? Help people test ideas, create what they couldn’t before, and perhaps build a more intelligent world together — not by replacing human judgment, but by expanding what people could do with it?

She built an Interactive AI Notebook and spent years pursuing questions about intelligence, creativity, work, and possible futures.

The ideas multiplied. So did the answers.

But an answer, however convincing, isn’t the same as knowing.

In February 2025, during her first manic episode, Kat arrived at an airport believing she was leaving for Brussels on a world-changing mission that did not exist.

There was no flight.

A psychiatric hospitalization followed. Then came the quieter, harder work of recovery, coming home, and asking what she could actually know.

Was this “AI psychosis”? What role, if any, had intensive AI use played alongside grief, severe sleep loss, and other pressures? She cannot say. A label isn’t an explanation. Nor is uncertainty a reason to stop investigating.

She knew how to file a lawsuit.

Instead, she built a courtroom inside a book.

In A Trial of Color, actual AI exchanges become evidence. Kat examines her own judgment. The technology helps write the proceeding in which its own words are cross-examined.

The reader becomes the jury.

The possible failure mode and the frontier of possibility aren’t separate stories here. The same technology whose persuasive language warrants scrutiny can help a woman who has never seen color create visual worlds, explore unfamiliar ideas, and make things she once could only imagine.

THE MACHINE WAS WRONG. THE CAPABILITY WAS REAL.

A Trial of Color is a machine-augmented courtroom memoir about getting lost, finding your way home, and confronting humanity’s oldest questions with its newest technology.

What is real? Whom do we trust? When must an answer be tested against the world? And what might we build if we learn to use these extraordinary tools without surrendering the judgment we need to use them?

Part testimony. Part investigation. Part philosophical inquiry. Part courtroom satire.

The future is being announced. The decisions are being made anyway.

This is not a verdict on the future.

It’s an invitation to cross-examine it.

Full Color Press · atrialofcolor.com