The Art of Being Young, Messy, and Human

I started writing my novel A Universe Gone Awry as a 10-year-old, based on a world I played pretend in with my sister and her friends. Any sensible adult would find it to be incoherent nonsense, and writing about it now as a sixteen-year-old, I would too. But still, I think of it fondly. The prose was awful, sure, and the grammar, even worse. But it was real. And it was my story.

It had the same ugly beauty as a child’s finger painting or a birthday cake made by an inexperienced but well-intentioned baker. There’s so much more joy and authenticity in those things than in a piece of Ross wall art or a premade Walmart cake. I believe that “ugly beauty” will become an increasingly valued facet of the human experience as AI invades the sanctuaries of creatives.

When I first created my website to start building my brand identity, I was surprised and, honestly, a little disgusted at the amount of generative AI I had to encounter. It’s front and center on so many platforms and touted as a feature. As useful as Wix is, I hope one day to move off the site, though I worry that an AI-free alternative may not even exist. Is it too much to ask for to be given the peace to make my own decisions? Even in my high school, students phone in projects using AI sites. And yes, they are blocked, but they seem to always find a way. The irony is not lost on me that these students, trying to take the path of least resistance, have to put in more effort to access these sites and hide their tracks than those who just do it the old-fashioned way. The plague has even spread to teachers, most of whom don’t even recognize that the YouTube video they’re playing is completely AI-generated. I cannot fault most of them for that mistake; those teachers seem to be on the older side.

Around my small coastal Oregon town with a large and vibrant art community, I feel sad to see that some of the posters on small businesses’ windows are AI-generated. I get angry and start to think, “Do these people even know the impact of normalizing this kind of stuff? Especially in a community like ours?” Those sorts of thoughts made me compelled to write this piece. As I’ve experienced these things, it’s made me deeply value the ugly beauty in life even more. I’ve also noticed a culture shift in that direction, with more acceptance towards different body types or features like freckles or imperfect teeth that were previously ostracized. I see it as a sign of resistance, and it gives me hope for the world my generation will inherit.

And of course, not all AI is bad. I’m specifically speaking of generative AI and the way that people’s temptation to take the easy way out has calcified into laziness and complacency. I’m not ignorant of the ways that AI can help us in predicting natural disasters, solving medical mysteries, and analyzing large data sets to improve our society. But, as evidenced by my website-building experience and my walks around town, it can’t possibly be the answer for everything. I especially don’t want future generations to think that it is.

Lately, I found myself listening to old jazz and bossa nova, not only because it makes wonderful study and writing music, but because the improvisation and the little moments where a musician messes up just make the song so much better. In the age of generative AI, I’m choosing to share my imperfect writing and my messy thoughts with the world because the world deserves my beautifully ugly art.

And it deserves yours, too.

(This post was cross-posted from my Substack, which can be found in the linktree in my bio.)

Thank you so much for reading!

My debut novel, A Universe Gone Awry, comes out in Spring 2026