Today I uploaded a short clip from Starborn Alive to TikTok. It’s a lighthearted moment — a routine traffic stop in orbit, with a patrol ship pulling over a grandmother’s old shuttle on her way home to cook dinner for her grandson. Nothing dark, nothing controversial.
But TikTok’s algorithm didn’t agree.
The video was instantly flagged and removed. The reason? Fraud.
Apparently, my fictional space patrol was mistaken for some kind of scam. Why? Most likely because of the blinking blue-and-red lights, the realistic AI-generated voices, words “citation” and “officers” in the dialogue, and maybe the fact that I marked it as AI-generated. Put those things together, and the system somehow decided I was giving instructions on forging documents or running a con (!).
Of course, the truth is simpler (and funnier): the AI just couldn’t tell the difference between fictional worldbuilding and the real world.
So maybe this is the best compliment I could get — that my sci-fi looks so authentic it breaks TikTok’s filters.
And honestly, I’ll take it.
Starborn Alive releases September 19. If you want to see what kind of world could fool even an algorithm, this is just the beginning.