For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Sir Isaac Newton said this, presumably after a long day of scrolling whatever the social media platform of the time was. To wit, the moment I finished reading an excellent essay by Marisa Kabas about refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism, I encountered the following headline: “Esquire AI-Generated A Fake Interview With Live-Action One Piece Actor Mackenyu Because He Was Busy.” Either I’m losing my mind, or the world is.
This isn’t one of those cases where a publication quietly leaned on AI and only copped to it after getting called out. Esquire Singapore fully admitted what it was doing when it published the story and used it as a supposed selling point! From the piece:
We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it. So, we opted for e-mail correspondence. A list of queries was sent his way, and we waited. The silence continued until it was quickly replaced by a ticking clock as deadlines loomed.
We had the photospread, but nothing directly uttered by the 29-year-old. With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses.
Are these the words we expect from Mackenyu? Or are they just replies from an echo chamber of celebrity-hood that we want to believe is from him?
Clearly the latter, you fools! You hacks! You credulous dipshits!
This groundbreaking new approach to lying produced riveting exchanges like:
ESQ: Any advice on how to deal with pressure and expectations?
(AI) M: I separate pressure from weight. Pressure is external; like people's expectations. That I can't control, but the weight of family legacy… the goal isn’t to match my father. It's to make him proud, and maybe inspire someone else to do the same. Pressure can crush you, but weight can ground you.
And:
ESQ: What has fatherhood taught you?
(AI) M: That you can't rehearse it. (laughs) Everything else in my life I can prepare. Fatherhood has no script. No second take. You're just there, and you figure it out in real time. It's humbling in a way nothing else is.
You were talking to a chatbot! It did not laugh! Shut the fuck up! Also, as Kotaku notes, the chatbot certainly never knew Mackenyu’s father, deceased action star Sonny Chiba, and I cannot think of a single person in their right mind who would ask a predictive text generator a question so probing and personal about the feelings of a human being who’s very much still alive. That is deranged behavior! To be clear, I believe, on no uncertain terms, that the person who wrote this is deranged!
I cannot believe I even have to say this, but if you’re trying to publish an interview feature, and you’re unable to procure the interview in question, then you scrap the story. There is no “driving need” for a piece that supersedes that. The world was not crying out for this essential dollop of PR fluff. You can find interviews with Mackenyu, specifically, on numerous websites and, of course, YouTube. If anything, all Esquire has demonstrated here is that this kind of journalism matters so little that it can be farmed out to a robot homunculus and still pass muster.
It is bonkers to me that anyone thought this was a good idea—let alone that multiple people (if we include editors) presumably did. They should all hang their heads in shame forever, quit their jobs immediately, and give them to a few of the thousands of vastly more deserving reporters who, in a twist of fate that borders on maniacal, are currently out of work. These people would be better served casting away their old lives and embarking on a journey to find the actual One Piece, a treasure I’m well aware is fictional. Despite that rather substantial stumbling block, they would still find more success in that arena than in this one.
This is what happens when AI rots journalists’ brains beyond the point that they can’t discern the difference between a good idea and a terrible one—to the point that they can only conceive of angles that involve AI.
That in mind, a salient section from Kabas’ piece:
If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave. No one is making you be a journalist; it’s not one of those jobs parents force you to choose, like a doctor or a lawyer. Journalism, while romanticized in popular culture, is generally unglamorous and poorly paid, with progressively worse job opportunities (no thanks to AI.) I’m careful not to refer to it as a calling because that seems to excuse sacrificing mental health in service of craft, but I do believe that it’s a job that can’t be forced. It’s obvious to readers when your heart isn’t in it.
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Luke Plunkett
