Specifically—as explained in a meandering introductory note to the piece, that attempts to make this ghoulish little desperation play sound like a bold philosophical experiment—the magazine took a bunch of Mackenyu’s 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 “answers.” The resulting piece is a staggering success in the field of journalistic and editorial failure, from the basic idea that you wouldn’t just spike the whole piece due to scheduling issues, to the apparent belief that Esquire Singapore was incapable of coming up with questions interesting enough to baffle a half-assed Claude drone, to the editorial myopia involved in reading the “AI Mackenyu” speculate on the 29-year-old’s relationship to the legacy of his late father, acclaimed martial arts actor Sonny Chiba, and not thinking, “Hey, even for an inherently ghoulish concept, this should probably be cut.”
The article was actually published back in early March—deleting bare minimum hopes that it might be some sort of belated and grotesque April Fool’s prank—but, per Kotaku, only caught widespread attention this week. (Mackenyu’s extremely vocal fanbase is not happy, apparently.) Like we said, Esquire Singapore posits 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, “Hey, go fuck yourself.”
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