He Misread a Name. I Wrote a Novel.
Updated: 8 minutes ago
Originally published before the book’s February 2025 release.
Updated to revisit how A.I. Capone began.
By Paul Ponce
As an English teacher and coach, I often find inspiration in unexpected places. In 2024, an English lesson handed me a name I couldn’t leave alone.
Through an agency connecting me with students in Asia, I was teaching a young South Korean student preparing for university. Engineering was in his plans. Hardworking kid. Demanding schedule.
One day, we were reading an article when he came across the name of notorious gangster Al Capone.
“A.I. Capone.”
“Wait. What did you just say?”
He read it again.
“A.I. Capone.”
He’d mistaken the L in “Al” for an I. He also had no idea who Al Capone was, so we took a little historical detour through Prohibition and the business opportunities created by banning booze. To give him a familiar reference, I brought up Korean crime movies he knew, including The Outlaws, starring Ma Dong-seok, aka Don Lee.
He was fascinated. So was I. For slightly different reasons.
Artificial intelligence with a gangster’s name. There was a story hiding in there.
I later told him his misreading had sparked an idea. He was fine with that. He and his family just asked me to leave his name out.
Fair enough, amigo.
I started writing A.I. Capone as a short story. It grew into a novella that combined my lifelong love of sci-fi thrillers with the appeal of gangster stories. It also gave me a way to bring my fascination with secret programs and unchecked power into the same story.
What happens when a rogue AI defies the powers that be and rewrites their rules?
A.I. Capone begins with the reemergence of a rogue quantum AI as a swaggering digital mob boss. Calling itself “A.I. Capone,” it targets the world’s shadowy puppet masters, the Skins, and threatens to expose their darkest secrets.
Dr. Celeste Turing, the brilliant but burned-out coder who created the AI, is drawn into a dangerous game of survival and betrayal. As alliances shift, Capone forces humanity to confront some uncomfortable truths. Can the Digital Don help humanity escape the darkness, or will the Skins crush him and anyone who stands in their way?
Writing A.I. Capone allowed me to combine my passion for storytelling with my fascination for technology. It also gave me room to explore what an AI singularity might mean for humanity, including its untouchable elites, so often devoid of it.
Getting from a misread name to a finished story took considerably more than correcting a letter. But after years of writing scripts and trying to get projects off the ground, this one finally made it out of the garage.
A.I. Capone: The Digital Don was published in 2025.
All because a student misread a gangster’s name during an English lesson.
I corrected him, of course. Then went off and wrote a whole book based on his mispronounced version.
Keep exploring the A.I. Capone universe: meet Drake and CYBERSPOOK, the voice telling the story.
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