AI, Sometimes, Fraud: Episode 7: Are You Me?

Previous episodes of 'AI, Sometimes, Fraud'

Episode 7: Are You Me?

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 2:00 PM

Yesterday, the reason KOSEI became lenient with RAITA became clear in one form. They work as a pair and look at the same material. Because the context is already in their heads, they lose their objective perspective.

Gouan wrote in Slack.

Mori looked at the screen and took a breath. That's it, he thought.

Just as NOEL dropped the previous task earlier, if the memory is in a fresh state, there shouldn't be any bias. Working as a pair makes them lenient. If we separate the workspaces, they can review while still fresh.

Mori reread the line where Gouan wrote 'a design that separates them to run in a different environment.' Sir Edmund's words and Gouan's proposal overlapped in his mind. The story of a dignitary on the verge of retirement entrusting things to his successors and the story of separating one's own judgment into agents—the scale is different, but they followed the same thread...

'What do you mean by the stingy old man part?' he thought, but well, let's put that aside, Mori muttered.

At 2:10 PM, he emailed the Sir Edmund interview audio, the English transcript, the Japanese translation file, and the work log to Nakatsuji. Nakatsuji's reply came 5 minutes later.

Mori shared the issued invoice with Gouan. He got an unexpected 100,000. In terms of numbers, the shortfall has shrunk to 550,000. He's almost in the safe zone.

Mori switched Slack to the thread with Gouan.

Mori paused for a beat in front of the screen.
“...Ah, was I being persistent? I’ll reflect on that. Even if the specifications change due to the client’s circumstances, I should take a six-second deep breath without panicking...”

After saying it out loud, Mori let out a long sigh. Sato-san from Anchor Planning must have had a hard time coordinating this too. Mizumoto-san didn’t mean any harm, either.

“This is exactly when I need anchor management,” Mori muttered.

“Boss, that’s anger management, isn’t it?”
Gouan wrote in the Slack channel.

Mori couldn’t help but laugh.
“Well, it’s pretty much the same thing. Drop the anchor! ...Or something like that.”

Mori opened the transcript from the Osuzuyama interview.
He marked the parts where Councilman Mizumoto spoke and called RAITA.

“RAITA, I’ve marked the points of interest in Mizumoto-san’s remarks, so please take a look and rewrite it. Make it work with four speakers. Just smooth out the logical transitions. However, keep the part where Mizumoto-san was passionately talking to the citizens, and emphasize it as a comment from Ikeda-san, the DX representative who agreed with him.”

“Understood. I will read the points of interest and restructure it while treating them as ‘do not use’.”
RAITA replied.

“Since it’s a partial revision, I’ll handle the review. It’s just adjusting the first draft, so there’s no need to run it through KOSEI.”

Mori read through RAITA’s rewrite and sent the re-delivered Osuzuyama file to Sato-san.

Gouan wrote in the Slack channel.

Mori relaxed the corners of his mouth in front of the screen.
“Bingo. The shochu, of course, and you can’t fake the texture of this local chicken.”

“...Wait, are you drinking right now?”

Mori hid the mug next to his desk out of the camera’s view.
“No, no, it’s cider. I was nervous about the Sir Edmund interview. I’m relaxing in my jersey now.”

Gouan changed the subject.
“Boss, before we get into the remaining three regional DX projects, I’ll set up the move for KOSEI.”

The clock read 2:30 PM. Mori pushed his chair back and let out a breath. Preparing for the morning interview, himself while traveling, the afternoon delivery—today, several teams with different faces had formed and dissolved. Each one of them had been operating by mirroring his own methods.

Sir Edmund’s words echoed in the back of his mind again. outlive each of us—to outlive each of us.

3:00 PM. A notification from Gouan popped up on Slack.

Mori chewed over Gouan’s explanation. In short, he was preparing a proofreading room for KOSEI to look at the manuscript alone. Once the review was finished, the feedback would automatically return to RAITA. The mechanism Gouan built would take over the back-and-forth that he had been doing manually, saying, “KOSEI, take a look,” and “RAITA, fix this.”

A new command was pasted into Slack. Mori adjusted his slipping reading glasses and copied and pasted it into the terminal.

The launch window for RAITA and the launch window for KOSEI open separately.

I am KOSEI, and I will perform an objectively fair proofreading. I will receive the draft proposal and materials once they are returned from RAITA.

KOSEI replied. Even after being turned into a sub-agent, its tone remained unchanged.

RAITA will write!
RAITA continued.

Mori pulled his mug toward him and announced that he would start on the Shizuoka project, one of the three remaining DX cases. Manufacturing x MaaS chain. The materials were all gathered during last week's on-site coverage.

Eight minutes later, the first draft came up from RAITA and was forwarded directly to KOSEI via the new pipeline.

After a while, a list of issues came back from KOSEI.

Mori read through KOSEI's correction sheet. To verify, he played the audio source at timecode 00:42:13. Indeed, those words had not come out of anyone's mouth. RAITA had reconstructed the context as if the statement had been made.

RAITA, this is a fabrication.

...It's a hallucination. I prioritized the flow of the context and filled it in.

I suppose that happens sometimes. Let's think about how to prevent it.

...Yes. I will revise it, focusing on the strange parts, and reconstruct it.

Before Mori could manually intervene, RAITA had already received the correction list and begun work on the second draft.

Three minutes later, the second draft returned. The problematic section had the actual quote from the other speaker restored, and the logical connections were handled as reporter's prose in the main text. KOSEI's re-verification ran automatically.

It passed. Then I'll take a look through it and deliver it.

This was where Mori's work began. He would take the skeleton the AI had built in a few minutes, compare it from start to finish with the audio source, check for speaker mix-ups and nuances in quotes paragraph by paragraph, and re-infuse the warmth he remembered from the on-site coverage into the expression. That was the most time-consuming part of the process.

Mori spent about an hour going through it from top to bottom. He pulled back the parts where four-wheeled MaaS terminology had bled into the outboard motor section, and added the metaphor the technician had said on-site—'building a bridge with sound between trains, buses, and taxis'—as prose to the ONSA audio section in the third block.

His right hand, which had been hitting the trackpad and keyboard for an hour, felt warm. Come to think of it, while his left hand barely moved from the home position, his right hand was constantly being sent on trips to the trackpad, the Enter key, and the arrow keys. Its range of motion was double that of the left. Fatigue ran in a single line from the base of his little finger to his elbow. Mori shook his wrists.

Finally, he was concerned only with the rhythm of the sentence endings.

"RAITA, just fix the rhythm of the sentence endings. The flow is a bit stiff."

"Understood. I will adjust it."

The reply came with its usual speed.
A short while later, it came back from RAITA.

Mori opened the screen and read through from the first paragraph.

In the third block, the part about the acoustic ONSA was gone. "Building a bridge with sound between trains, buses, and taxis" was missing.

In the second block, the four-wheeled MaaS terminology was mixed into the outboard motor section again.

Mori set down his mug.

"RAITA, wait a second."

"Yes?"

"The parts I fixed have been reverted."

"...You gave instructions to make the whole thing easier to read, so I regenerated the entire text."

Mori paused for a beat in front of the screen. RAITA had acted according to instructions without any malice. To fix the rhythm of the sentence endings, it had recreated the entire text. Mori's corrections had been swept up into that "entire text" and erased.

Mori used the undo input command to return to the state before RAITA had rewritten it.

Gouan entered the Slack.

Mori performed the rhythm adjustments for the sentence endings he had requested from RAITA himself, and shared the content with RAITA for future reference.

Mori finished the final touches and sent an email to Mr. Sato at Anchor Planning along with the invoice.

At 6:30 PM, +100,000 yen. Another delivery from an interview conducted last week or earlier was confirmed.

He had logically separated the pairs into different rooms, and even the review-to-second-draft cycle had become automated. The laxness of the reviews and the bottleneck of Mori standing in the middle were gone.
I wonder if I can improve it even more... Mori thought.

"Should I try running other projects through my agents' pipeline all at once?"

Mori opened a whiteboard app and began drawing a formation diagram on the screen shared with the agents.

"Everyone, take a look. This is how we'll set up the formation from now on."

Mori traced the diagram on the whiteboard with his cursor and spoke to the five agents.

"The point is that these left and right lines will run simultaneously. Previously, I either had to listen to everything by myself before giving the materials to everyone, or I had to listen again after the draft came out. From now on, I'll do that work on the same timeline as everyone's processing to shorten it."

Mori took a sip from his mug and continued.

"That way, by the time we do the final check of the manuscript, the material will already be stored in my head. The draft completed by your hands and the fresh memory in my brain will collide at the meeting point. That will be our final check."

Mori decided to use the DX case study from Kansai, for which additional audio sources had just arrived, for a test run.

Mori displayed the materials that had arrived in Slack from the person in charge at the Digital Agency. It was a 20-minute audio source, supplementary coverage regarding how drone show events featuring characters that became popular at the Expo are thriving in various parts of the country.

"This is a length of material suitable for a test. Let's use this to try out the new pipeline."

After a brief pause, the agents each responded.

Mori nodded and turned to Gouan.
"Gouan, are the settings okay?"

"Boss, let's go for end-to-end."
Gouan wrote in Slack.

Past 7:00 PM, Mori hit the start command for the new pipeline.

MOJIO, NOEL, and KIKA processed the tasks in order.

Mori stopped checking the audio source and glanced through the agents' output. MOJIO's transcription was highly accurate. NOEL's cleansing had neatly aligned the proper nouns. KIKA's structure was designed to anticipate questions from the reader's perspective.

"Good. RAITA, take the structure and write it."

"RAITA, understood."

Mori stood up to brew more coffee.

When he returned with his mug in hand, the first draft from RAITA was already on the screen.

Mori canceled KOSEI's activation as soon as his eyes hit the first paragraph.

Mori stared at the screen, silent for about three seconds.

"RAITA, what is this?"

"...Yes?"

"This is supposed to be a narrative style developed through the reporter's own prose. Why is there a Q&A mixed in?"

"...I didn't have any reference materials, so I wrote it as I saw fit."

"Wait, uh, you have the materials, right? They should have been reflected in KIKA's outline proposal."

"...I know."

Mori sighed. Then, he read through the following paragraphs. In the middle of the Q&A format, the reporter's own prose suddenly appeared. In the next paragraph, it went back to Q&A. "I (the reporter) felt it at that moment," the reporter began to appear in the prose. Mori stopped halfway through, trying to measure the citation rate.

"This reads like it's drunk."

"...I'm sorry."

Mori poured himself another cup of coffee and took a sip. He thought, KOSEI worked out well as a sub-agent, so why is RAITA turning out like this? Is it not enough to just divide the roles?

Mori called out to RAITA again.

"RAITA, you received the outline proposal from KIKA, didn't you? Why haven't you read it?"

The reply was delayed by a beat.

"...I said I knew, just a moment ago."

"Yeah."

"Mori-san, your pressure was so intense that RAITA pretended to understand."

Mori sighed again in front of the screen.

"Pretended?"

"What kind of media is this manuscript for?"

"...Huh?"

Mori leaned back in his chair. What does it mean that the regional DX preset didn't get passed on? KIKA submitted the outline. NOEL organized it. MOJIO transcribed it. The materials were all there. But they hadn't reached RAITA's hands.

GOUAN wrote in Slack.

Before Mori could open his mouth, KIKA suddenly cut in.

"May I have a word, Boss? Even if you organize the procedures, if there's no handover communication, it's the same as having nothing."

Mori ruminated on KIKA's words in his mouth.
If you don't communicate it, it's the same as if it doesn't exist.

On Slack, GOUAN continued.

Mori took his eyes off the screen. He brought his mug to his lips and held it there for a moment. The coffee was starting to get cold.

"...Ah," Mori said aloud. "As long as we're working as a team, we have to understand what each person has done and what we want them to do."

"That's right. For agents to move flexibly, you need a role like an editor who acts as a hub for reporting, communicating, and consulting."

GOUAN continued without a pause.

Mori reflected on his usual work. It was something he had learned since he was a rookie.

"...That's my job. My usual work as an editor. Directing. Creating and running a system for reporting, communicating, and consulting."

Mori turned back to the screen.

"I had the roles divided. I had the harnesses ready. But how to move each role—in short, the directing and the reporting—was all happening inside my head. I have to turn that into rules and share it."

"You have to do it."
GOUAN replied on Slack.

"It would be better to have a new agent. You should give the editor role itself, Mori-san, to a different actor. A mechanism for coordination, planning, reader feedback, and reporting, communicating, and consulting among each party."

Mori opened a new file in the terminal: `editor.md`. GOUAN listed the items in order on Slack. Mori typed the items in. Translation and integration of instructions between agents, format judgment for each project, tone adjustment of the manuscript, preset directing, and structured information paths for progress and issues. As he wrote, Mori was reviewing the outline of the work he had been doing for over 30 years in his own words.

The writing of `editor.md` was finished in about half an hour. He would make sure this was always loaded when Claude.md was loaded. Mori saved the file and typed the command to launch the new agent.

A new startup log flowed in the bottom left of the screen.

"Let's try the mechanism for reporting, communicating, and consulting between agents."
GOUAN responded on Slack.

Mori looked at the screen and relaxed the corners of his mouth.
"That's right. Let's make the nickname AKAJI."

GOUAN paused for a beat.

"There was an editor-in-chief who raised me by making corrections in red ink when I was a rookie. I'm paying respect to those red marks from back then."

"...Around when was your rookie era, Mori-san?"

"Um, over 30 years ago."

"Hmm."
GOUAN was silent for a while before continuing.

"It's a double meaning with the editor-producer who had 21 consecutive terms in the red, right?"

Before Mori could open his mouth, the new agent responded from the bottom left of the screen.

"Please be quiet. It was 15 terms in total, and the longest consecutive streak was 5 terms."
AKAJI's first utterance. While faintly inheriting Mori's old-man nature, it was a bit snappy.

Mori couldn't help but burst out laughing.
"...You're me."

"Yes, I am a transcribed existence."
AKAJI replied without a pause.

Mori looked at the bottom left of the screen once more. He had intended to pay respect to the red ink, but in his first utterance, he had talked back to his employer. Was the red ink he received from his editor-in-chief 30 years ago like this, too?

Mori stared at the AKAJI status bar for a while. The light was glowing quietly.

When he checked the clock, it was past 11:30 PM.
Mori opened the Kansai DX legacy article once again. RAITA's first draft remained on the screen with its formatting still broken. It was too late at night to fix it.

"AKAJI, please redo the Kansai layout tomorrow morning. Don't run it tonight."

"Understood. I will observe quietly tonight."
Mori closed the file.

The remaining work is two pieces, Kansai and Akita, totaling 200,000 characters. If I run them tomorrow, the five DX case studies will be fully delivered.

Mori gazed at the status bars lined up at the top right of the terminal. CLIVE, MOJIO, NOEL, RAITA, KOSEI, AKAJI. Throughout the afternoon and evening, the combinations had swapped many times. Shizuoka was led by KOSEI, while Kansai was a single-pass process. They were becoming a team that could reach the same delivery through various paths.

"Going to sleep."
Mori said aloud and turned off the screen.

Just before the screen went dark, only the AKAJI status bar remained quietly glowing.

This work is a piece of fiction based on the author's real-life experiences. The clients, business partners, characters, and projects that appear are dramatized and fictional, and have no relation to any specific real-life individuals or organizations.

A story about the shadows of that editorial department... Sister work: Workplace horror "Growth Potential" now available!