How I Use A.I.

I’m the author and art director of every SumiPress book — the writing, the readings, the look, the decisions are mine. I also use A.I., and I’d rather tell you exactly where than leave you to guess. It does three jobs here, and my hand stays on it the whole way.

The images.

The artwork in the books is generated — the illustrations, the ink plates — and none of it arrives by accident. Each one starts as a composition I’ve already decided: the subject, the framing, the weight of the ink. Then it’s prompt-engineered through as many passes as it takes to land exactly that. The tool draws; I direct, reject, and redraw until the image is the one I saw. What it doesn’t touch is the book itself — the layout, the spreads, the typesetting, where every element sits on the page. That design is mine, set by hand, page by page. The tool makes the pictures to my brief; I build the book around them. And the monochrome-on-buff look isn’t a setting I picked off a menu — it’s a house style I hold to, image after image.

The research.

I don’t read Japanese — so A.I. is how I reach the sources an English-only writer usually can’t: the interviews, the old strategy mooks, the developer material, translated enough for me to work through. But nothing ships on the tool’s word. Every fact is checked against a second source before it earns a place in a book. The research is real; the tool is how I get to it, and the call on what’s true stays mine.

The editing.

Once a chapter’s written, I use A.I. the way any writer uses an editor — to flag a limp sentence, tighten a long one, tell me when a paragraph isn’t landing. It doesn’t write for me. It reads me back to myself, and I decide what stays.

Here’s the arithmetic underneath all of it. A book made the old way wants an illustrator, a translator, a researcher, and an editor — a team, and what a team costs. I’m one person in Johannesburg. A.I. is what lets one person direct all four of those jobs and still put out an object worth keeping. It isn’t a shortcut around the work; it’s what puts the work within reach of one set of hands.

That’s the whole of it. If it changes how you see the books, that’s yours to weigh — I’d just rather you weighed it knowing.

— Pierre