Esquire Singapore’s March issue featured the Japanese-American actor best known for his role as Roronoa Zoro in the Netflix version of One Piece. The second season of the series was released on March 10th.
The feature was published online and in print on March 6, but gained wider attention after a few weeks when it circulated on fan forums and social media platforms such as Bluesky, Reddit, and Instagram.
The use of AI was revealed in the article, with Esquire Singapore explaining that Mackenyu’s “verbatims were pulled verbatim from past interviews and fed into an AI program to construct new answers.”
The resulting work was presented in a question-and-answer format, covering topics such as the actors’ personal boundaries, mental health, and family values. The article also revealed that it was “produced with Claude and his co-pilot and edited by humans.”
Online reaction was largely negative. Many users were shocked, calling the piece “overblown,” “questionable” and an “insult to journalism.”
Some compared the interview to Gay Talese’s 1966 Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” but that profile was famously written without direct access to the singer. However, other users argued that Makkenyu’s work is different in that it relies on AI, and that it is “lazy journalism” and lacks creativity.
Advertising news platform Marketing Interactive reported that the backlash comes amid declining public trust in the media. Citing data from media analysis software Karma, it said sentiment towards the article was “overwhelmingly critical” with 83.3% negative, 14.5% neutral and 2.2% positive.
Marketing Interactive added that the controversy highlighted broader concerns about “consent and representation, the erosion of trust and confidence, labor and technology,” and noted that keywords such as “transgression” and “morality” frequently appeared in online discussions.
