Category: Commentary

A Twitter user called me unethical for defending AI in the creation of book covers. “It is certainly unethical to use AI in the creation process of anything intended to be sold for profit,” they declared—while typing on a device built with components sourced through child slave labor and weaponized rape. Six-year-olds work 12-hour days in the DRC to fund armed militias. Indigenous communities lose their water to lithium extraction. Rare earth mining poisons entire provinces. Every electronic device you touch on a daily basis requires human suffering on a scale you probably can’t comprehend. But an indie author using AI for marketing? That’s the great moral crisis facing us today. So let’s talk about principles—and why critics can’t answer basic questions about their own.

Authors are quietly using AI for covers, marketing, research, plotting, and more, while anti-AI activists rage impotently on Twitter and threaten boycotts on BookTok that never materialize. When a Midjourney-generated cover won a fantasy reader popularity contest, 2,500 scrutinizing fans couldn’t spot it. Only forensic metadata analysis revealed the truth. The backlash came after disclosure, not before. Authors who admit AI use fear review-bombing and boycott threats. Authors who stay silent? They face nothing and collect their royalties because readers can’t tell and frankly DGAF. At least 45% of all authors now use AI for their work in some fashion—and you won’t believe how many of them don’t admit it.

Deep in the ocean’s crushing darkness, male anglerfish are born with a single purpose: find a female and bite down. What happens next is biological horror—teeth fuse, tissues merge, and the male dissolves into her flesh. His eyes cloud. His brain shrinks. He becomes a living appendage, nothing more than tissue and gonads feeding on her blood. Evolution doesn’t care about dignity or selfhood. It only cares that genes survive. But if we’re all just meat puppets dancing to genetic strings, where does that leave human freedom—and the soul?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

We’ve internalized Golding’s vision: strip away civilization and children become monsters. But in 1965, six Tongan teenage boys actually got stranded on a deserted island for fifteen months. Instead of tribal warfare and murder, they thrived. They organized into rotating work teams, maintained a signal fire, built gardens, and created conflict resolution systems. When one boy broke his leg falling off a cliff, the others set his bone and adapted their work to include him. When Captain Peter Warner found them, they were healthy, organized, and still friends. The real story was unknown until 2020 while Golding’s fiction became cultural gospel. Maybe the question isn’t whether human nature is good or evil—it’s what conditions promote cooperation versus conflict.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

As a philosophy, Kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. My daughter survived open-heart and spinal surgery. Other girls mock her scars in the locker room. They don’t understand she’s a warrior. Whether our scars are from surgery, war, or trauma; whether visible or hidden—they’re proof we survived. It’s our scars that make us beautiful.