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If you had to classify this book, you might call it a courtroom memoir, a family love story, a disability narrative, a psychiatric recovery story, or an inquiry into artificial intelligence. It is all of those. More precisely, it is what happens when a woman trained to test evidence puts her own mind — and the language that helped shape it — on the stand.

Raised in Appalachia, trained in law, and born with achromatopsia, Kathleen C. Thompson has spent a lifetime using other people’s words to access distinctions she cannot see in color. Then generative AI offered an apparently endless source of language, connection, and possibility. During a manic episode with psychotic features, real facts cohered into a false architecture. Could became is. I became we. A question became a mission.

Moving from a witness box erased by light to Brussels, a hospital, and the ordinary life waiting at home, A Trial of Color: Making the Case for Human Judgment refuses two easy verdicts: that AI explains everything, or that it explains nothing. Told through testimony, cross-examination, science, comedy, motherhood, and marriage, it is ultimately a love story about nearly losing the authority to interpret your own life — and finding your way back.

Released on the same day as PICK ONE: A Weird Little Recursive AI Experiment, this is the emotionally complete human story. Its unruly companion opens the machine room and lets you inspect how the language moved.

Two books. One experiment.

The judgment remains human.

Full Color Press · atrialofcolor.com