{"id":563336,"date":"2026-04-04T03:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/563336\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T03:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:07:10","slug":"esquire-singapore-craps-out-ai-interview-with-one-piece-actor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/563336\/","title":{"rendered":"Esquire Singapore craps out “AI interview” with One Piece actor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, in \u201cKill it with fire\u201d news: The editors of\u00a0Esquire Singapore\u00a0recently adopted a novel approach to the admittedly daunting problem of having a profile (with attached photospread) scheduled to run on Japanese One Piece\u00a0actor Mackenyu, but no actual access to the man himself: They made the whole fucking thing up.<\/p>\n

Specifically\u2014as explained in a meandering introductory note to the piece<\/a>, that attempts to make this ghoulish little desperation play sound like a bold philosophical experiment\u2014the magazine took a bunch of Mackenyu\u2019s old interview answers, ran them through an AI, and then pelted the language model with their own questions, generating a laundry list of banal, cookie cutter \u201canswers.\u201d The resulting piece is a staggering success in the field of journalistic and editorial failure, from the basic idea that you wouldn\u2019t just spike the whole piece due to scheduling issues, to the apparent belief that Esquire Singapore\u00a0was incapable of coming up with questions interesting enough to baffle a half-assed Claude drone, to the editorial myopia involved in reading the \u201cAI Mackenyu\u201d speculate on the 29-year-old\u2019s relationship to the legacy of his late father, acclaimed martial arts actor Sonny Chiba, and not thinking, \u201cHey, even for an inherently ghoulish concept, this should probably be cut.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article was actually published back in early March\u2014deleting bare minimum hopes that it might be some sort of belated and grotesque April Fool\u2019s prank\u2014but, per\u00a0Kotaku<\/a>, only caught widespread attention this week. (Mackenyu\u2019s extremely vocal fanbase is not happy, apparently.) Like we said, Esquire Singapore\u00a0posits this as some sort of artistic expression on the unknowability of celebrity and the inherent distance of interviewing famous people; as reporters whose actual job involves sometimes figuring out how to talk to very well-known people about their lives and careers in ways that shed new light on their work and what it means to us, our response to that can only be a hearty, and vigorous, \u201cHey, go fuck yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, in \u201cKill it with fire\u201d news: The editors of\u00a0Esquire Singapore\u00a0recently adopted a novel approach to the admittedly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-563336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}