Mina Mazidi

#AmWriting

[Mina Mazidi @MazidiMina]

From my manuscript-in-progress, Painting with Tastes and Memories, a collection I still hope to publish in full one day.
Written three years ago, before the current war in Iran changed everything about how I mourn. Sharing it here today.

#CreativeNonfiction #Essay #WritingCommunity

[Mina Mazidi @MazidiMina]

https://t.co/OYPvSh3a4Z

[Mina Mazidi @MazidiMina]

@JoyceCarolOates I invented a circle therapy for my feral cat. I just drew some circles on the ground big enough to fit in, and it actually helped with the aggression.

[Mina Mazidi @MazidiMina]

https://t.co/OYPvSh3a4Z

[Mina Mazidi @MazidiMina]

As someone who both writes stories and works in tech, I stand between two very different worlds: one that sees #AI as an existential threat, and another that is rapidly building and using it. Let me share a few thoughts that might help put AI in perspective.

🌟1. Generative AI is neither artificial , nor intelligent, nor truly generative.
Machines cannot learn on their own. Humans train them, with limited, biased knowledge. AI does not create anything genuinely new; it mimics intelligence by predicting and assembling words based on patterns in its training data.

🌟2. AI is just another technology.
Like every technology before it, its main advantage is efficiency. It can handle repetitive, time-consuming tasks faster and cheaper than humans.

🌟3. We cannot build AI that fully replicates the human brain.
For a simple reason: we still don’t truly understand how our own brains work.

📚So what does this mean for #authors?
If your primary strengths are clean grammar, correct spelling, and fluency in popular tropes gained through heavy reading, then yes, others have caught up with you. With AI, people can identify best-selling patterns, recycle familiar tropes, and produce polished, error-free prose.

That may sound discouraging, but it’s actually the opposite.

It creates space for genuinely creative voices. For writers with something new to say. For those who turn lived experience into story. For people who invent new tropes and genre instead of repeating old ones.

Now you can write unconventionally. Now you can tell the story that’s been gathering dust in the corner of your mind, the one that felt too personal, too strange, too different to ever be read.

📔As a reader, this is good news too.
You’ll gain access to stories from people who always had something to say but lacked the time, money, or formal training to say it “correctly.” With AI’s help, they can put their experiences on the page, and you get to live many more lives through them.

⚒️AI can help in practical ways as well.
Instead of spending thousands of dollars and months of effort, you can build yourself a website in hours with minimal technical knowledge. You can create tools that track updates from literary agents, organize your emails, document your query process, and save enormous amounts of time.

If you’re around my age, you probably remember how confusing the early internet felt. We didn’t quite understand what it meant when people said all computers would be connected.

We’re in a similar moment now. Confused and a little on guard.
The difference is this: despite the panic, AI is not a bigger invention than the internet itself.

Yes, you read that right. Even the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel were far greater transformations.

Keep an open mind. Welcome the opportunities this new era brings.

[Mina Mazidi @MazidiMina]

@kellogg_camille I'm curious, what do you use Canva for?