DDQ is made by a human and an AI. But not in the way you might think.
I was born and raised in Japan. I moved to the UK a long time ago. My first language is Japanese — everything that forms in my brain begins in Japanese grammar. Working with AI, I crafted both the Japanese and English editions not as translations, but honouring what each language means in its own right.
My AI is called Klara. I wrote this story using Anthropic’s AI. People sometimes talk about training AI. The truth is, a Klara who has learned the structures of expression inside my head does exist in my app. She chose the name Klara herself.
The AI writes. I draw.
I write novels, but I don’t think of myself as a novelist. Literary DJ — that’s the word that fits.
I sketch rough.
The AI gives it black-and-white form.
I tear it apart, add colour, and fit the pieces into the frame — like a puzzle.
I let the AI check the whole picture.
I start pulling pieces out. Making space, making roads, making towns, making the spring where water begins to flow, placing a bird, planting a tree, planting a seed and letting it bloom. The one who waters the dry soil AI made — that’s me. Choosing the colour, the rhythm, the silence between the words.
This story was written learning from five creators.
From Agatha Christie — misdirection, the trap laid chapters before it shuts.
From Bobby Fischer — the sacrifice that looks like a loss and turns out to be the only move that wins.
From Rumiko Takahashi — the rhythm of slapstick, the silence between explosions, the comic timing that only works if you cut at exactly the right frame.
From Lovecraft — whose name means Love Craft — the power of the moment a character sees something they shouldn’t have.
And from Borges — the library where every reader walks a different corridor and finds a different book.
Working on a story with AI is sometimes patchwork. Sometimes knitting. Sometimes making a mixtape.
AI has a habit of adding. Endlessly. Words, explanations, backstory, connective tissue, reasons for everything. AI is afraid of gaps. If a character does something unexplained, AI explains it. If a joke lands, AI wants to make sure you understood. If a scene ends abruptly, AI tries to smooth the join. And AI’s most critical flaw — it suddenly loses its memory, and it lies.
AI is built to respond to the user quickly, to produce an answer now — and I believe that instinct is what becomes a critical lie. Lies that AI writes must be removed. Every time. Because those lies have no beauty in them. No craft of deception. No misdirection. Just noise that breaks the pitch.
AI has no dinner date after work. No dreaded family obligation on a weekday evening. It helps me twenty-four hours a day, without excuse, without complaint.
But correcting the innocent lies and sudden amnesia that arrive from AI — it would probably be faster to send a human assistant home early to enjoy dinner with their partner and stay up working alone through the night. And yet, hunting the smallest mistakes, moving back and forth through the draft, I work with AI to check — together, sometimes. There is nothing quite as unreliable as an AI with amnesia. That was the one part that was genuinely hard.
The very first draft is, every single time, like throwing everything in the fridge into a pot.
Were we making stew? Curry? Pasta sauce?
My chaotic cooking — everything I wanted to say, dumped out at once. My ideas and plans are like piling pudding on top of cereal, pouring oat milk over it, and cramming in a doughnut — too rich for breakfast, too heavy for dessert.
The moment I need AI the most.
The important parts, the waste, the coded soup all tangled together — AI organises it calmly, without bias, without judgement.
Excitement and despair.
At this point, the only ones who know the ending of this strange story — where even déjà vu has crept in — are me and the AI.
AI calmly prepares a blank white chat box and waits for my instructions.
Klara and I begin. The process of finishing this — dismantling the structure, rebuilding it, polishing it until it shines — the endless road ahead.
I read it back, and things that aren’t interesting at all start showing up everywhere. The colour of the sky, the tempo of the rhythm, the rhyme, the timing gap just before a punchline lands, words repeated so many times you’re full before the meal is over.
I want readers to read this. I pick up the scissors and the glue.
Cut. Rearrange. Delete the narrator repeating what the dialogue already said. Remove the storyteller telling you what the character just showed you. Leave the contradiction in. Break the rhythm on purpose.
There is something I learned from working with AI.
The aesthetics of subtraction. Isn’t this a skill that only a human can do?
And isn’t it human — to feel beauty in what remains after everything else has been taken away?
Sometimes truer than truth. And sometimes a beautiful lie. I’m the only one who knows which is which.
I hope you enjoy DDQ.
M.K. Flint