I was asked where I got the idea for "Veil of Dawn’s Promise," a question I could not fully answer then. After some thought, I pieced together a chain of events that led to the story.As a teenager in high school, I did not enjoy reading since my only exposure to books was through my teachers, who assigned classics from Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding, J.D. Salinger, and many others. In grade 13, a close friend bought me "The Lord of the Rings" for Christmas and convinced me to read it. With apprehension, I did as he asked, and it changed me. I started reading fantasy, a genre that swept me away to different places, on journeys with characters that touched my heart, emotions, and mind. This sparked an interest in me to write my own stories and bring people and places I could imagine to the world.However, this dream died quickly during my university days when I completed several short stories that were rejected by every publisher I approached. Their comments about my writing devastated me, and I abandoned the thought of writing. Still, I always enjoyed reading book after book in the fantasy and science fiction genres, which I continue to do today, now that I am in my 60s.After finishing high school, I did my undergraduate studies, first in Physics. Several years after graduating, I returned to school and earned a degree in Computer Science. After that, I was fortunate enough to land my first post-graduate job as a research assistant in artificial intelligence. This job provided me with firsthand exposure to the potential of AI to benefit humankind if appropriately implemented. However, being early in AI research and development, I knew we were on a long journey before this technology would be ready for general use.When I left the AI research world, I used computers to build solutions for immediate problems in the oil, telecommunications, and defense industries. In all these areas, I looked for ways to use technology, preferably in an automated way, to achieve desired outcomes. No AI was involved, only complex algorithms following well-crafted rules to solve complex problems.Throughout my life’s journeys, I’ve always wanted to write but felt inadequate in my ability to tell stories that others would enjoy. Then, something called ChatGPT came along, and out of curiosity, I explored this tool to see what an AI could do if it were ready for general use. At first, I used this AI tool to help answer work-related questions, and it did a fine job providing answers that I could tailor to my needs. Then, I wondered if it could help me write my reports or at least give me templates to streamline my writing process. This is when I realized that AI could help me be a better writer, so I wrote a book about using AI to help write stories. I created many prompts that touched on various aspects of story writing, and I loved the outcomes, although many had to be discarded until I mastered Prompt Engineering. I called this book “Conversation with Creativity.” It took a long time to write, even with the help of an AI tool, and the book was published with a cover that took me countless hours to create using AI – more than 600 images – and a photo editing tool. I was proud of myself until I started using the prompts from my book to write a full-length novel. This story was sparked from the cover of “Conversation with Creativity,” where I could see technology evolving at an accelerating pace, making me wonder where we are headed.Using the lessons from my book on writing stories, I struggled—a lot. After about three or four chapters, I learned that AI has significant weaknesses in understanding context and remembering what was written in a previous paragraphs. It often repeated itself, using the exact words repeatedly and sometimes confusing my characters' names. It got so bad that I pulled my book “Conversation with Creativity” from the market and archived it, never to be re-released. I felt embarrassed for releasing it in the first place. I had fooled myself that the AI could write a novel, and I did not want others to follow the same path based on my guidance, which did not work as intended for me.However, I did not give up on my dream to write the story I had in mind, which needed telling. I continued using AI, but in a different way than I had initially intended. Over 16 months, I wrote my book as best as possible, using the words I knew and making expected grammatical errors; I also used AI, as I would use a human editor to point out my mistakes and omissions and make suggestions to fix my writing. This is where the AI helped a lot. It did not write the story I wanted to tell; it helped me correct the errors in my story – but not ideally. It’s just a tool like a grammar-correcting program, a powerful search engine, and a vast database of information. We should not fear AI but look at how to use it to improve daily tasks because it is not going away.It was this journey that sparked “Veil of Dawn’s Promise.” Technology is evolving all around us, and cameras are everywhere. Have you read Orwell’s 1984? Now, we have AI being integrated with everything. Should we fear that AI will take over our lives? Or should we be wary of influential people who would use AI to their benefit and take over our lives? This is the premise of “Veil of Dawn’s Promise.” I even reused the cover from “Conversation with Creativity” since it started and belongs to this story.Read more about this authorRead less about this author