On Esquire Singapore’s AI interview with Mackenyu
MAYBE MACKENYU HAD A COLD
It has been a fantastic week for Singapore journalism. This week, our national newspaper, along with several other local media outlets, wrongly reported that Cotton On was closing all of its stores in Asia. The news sparked a frenzy. In the current version of the Straits Times article, however, you will find no proof of that mistake, not even a little note clarifying that a correction has been made. It’s like it never happened. (Lying to the reading public constitutes as a certifiable Straits Crime, methinks.) On a Reddit post about the whole hoo-ha, the user cheesetofuhotdog surmised: “That’s the issue with current media. Race to be first, not to be factual.”
In another recent example of how little the Singaporean media cares about facts, Esquire Singapore ran an interview that didn’t happen at all. This was for its March 2026 cover story with Mackenyu, no less. Despite having already done a shoot with the One Piece star remotely (seems like it was shot in LA?), the Esquire Singapore team couldn’t get a hold of the Japanese-American actor, and so:
“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.”
The AI-generated interview hasn’t gone down well with Mackenyu fans on Twitter, some of whom are “disgusted” and “disappointed” that Esquire Singapore made the call to Frankenstein Mackenyu’s responses from his past interviews. (Since writing this, Western publications like AV Club, Kotaku, Aftermath and PC Gamer have also reported about it.)
I’m trying to wrap my head around how a decision like this was even made, as someone who is working in the Singapore media industry; whose creative output is being devalued, day by day; and whose livelihood is being threatened by the rise of LLMs like Claude, which is one of the tools that Esquire Singapore used to “produce” the “interview”. (The other one was Microsoft Copilot.)
Of course, there are many different teams involved in making a single magazine cover story happen. In this case, there is Heart Media, the publisher of Esquire Singapore. It’s a company that I previously worked for. It operates pretty much like most other publishing houses that run fashion titles in Singapore: that is, they put star power and social media engagement above all else. Those are the things that land the brand-sponsored covers and advertorials that pay the bills, anyway.
Speaking of which, the Esquire Singapore cover appears to be paid for by Tod’s, going by the styling in Mackenyu’s shoot, but I can’t confirm that. The Italian luxury brand started in the 1920s as a shoes and leather goods business. It later evolved into a Fashion Brand with the introduction of ready-to-wear in 2007, by its first creative director, Derek Lam. Many years (and several creative directors) later, Tod’s has come to stand for quiet and sophisticated luxury.
The Italian brand has been expanding its presence in Asia in recent years. In the past year alone, Tod’s has opened new stores in Macau, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. It also appointed Japanese idol Shota Watanabe, South Korean actress Hyorin Bang, and Chinese actor and singer Xiao Zhan as its brand ambassadors. Mackenyu fits right into that line-up of East Asian stars, and would make sense as a Tod’s guy. But considering that he was attending Chanel’s show at Paris Fashion Week in March, a few days after his Esquire Singapore cover was released, Mackenyu may be more interested in being a Chanel Man.
Mackenyu is the other party in all of this. Esquire Singapore suggests that he (or his team) was simply not responsive: “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.”
Questions arise: Why couldn’t Mackenyu respond? Was he given enough time to do so? How can a Netflix star be harder to reach than God, or Fiona Apple?
Did Mackenyu’s team even brief him that he had an interview to do? Are they OK with the AI answers? Was the publisher or the fashion brand pressuring the magazine to go to print, to run the images anyway? Was the magazine simply a victim of the Mercury retrograde back in February?
I know from personal experience how hard it is to put a print magazine together every single month. You’re working with smaller teams and shrinking budgets and shorter timelines. Working on a print magazine is a different kind of hell from, say, being an influencer, or working in finance, or running a luxury fashion brand. (Even Marc Jacobs, once considered the busiest man in fashion, can attest to that.)
All of which to say: sometimes magazines resort to desperate measures to go to print. But it seems unethical to take the work of other writers—the ones who conducted past interviews with Mackenyu, and transcribed and edited his answers, and wrote coherent profiles about him—and feed it into an LLM to generate Mackenyu’s answers to personal questions like “What has fatherhood taught you?” or “What makes you laugh these days?”.
It’s especially alarming for an edition of Esquire—which is marketed as an intelligent men’s title, and which prides itself for once publishing such writers as Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Ernest Hemingway (they won’t let you forget that one)—to serve up soulless AI slop to its readers.
Is Esquire Singapore saying that good writers don’t matter anymore? Are they siding with the Big Fashion Machine and agreeing that words are mere accessory to imagery? (After all, the Esquire Singapore cover currently has over 26 thousand likes on Instagram.)
Have they surrendered to the oft-repeated generalisation that, well, nobody reads anyway? And if the answer is yes, and the writing doesn’t matter, what distinguishes Esquire Singapore from another local men’s fashion magazine like, say, Men’s Folio, or the forthcoming GQ Singapore?
I also wonder if anyone else sees the irony of all this happening at an edition of Esquire, the same magazine that published Gay Talese’s famous profile of Frank Sinatra, which Talese wrote despite Sinatra refusing to be interviewed, and which became one of the most influential pieces of journalism.
Maybe the Esquire Singapore team genuinely believed that running an AI-generated interview is a radical idea—that in doing so, it is doing the important work of investigating the meaning of a print magazine today, in the same way that Prada has been investigating the meaning of fashion campaigns with AI imagery.
One of the original purposes of a celebrity cover story, besides boosting magazine sales, was to serve the Big Celebrity Machine: it allowed the subject to promote the projects that he or she is working on, and to craft a persona or narrative that will make them appeal to the masses. A magazine cover could turn a star into an even bigger star—the kind that lands a front row seat at a Chanel fashion show.
Today, a Netflix gig is more than enough for an actor to “make it”. And given the dire state of the print industry, magazines need the stars, not the other way around. Magazines have less editorial or creative control when working with celebrities and brands now. Photoshoots are done remotely. Fashion brands enforce their “full look” policy on stylists. Brands sometimes supply editors with pre-completed Q&As with celebrities. And sometimes they supply the magazine covers, too. (See: BTS star Jungkook’s recent covers for AugustMan Malaysia and L’Officiel Homme Singapore, both sponsored and shot by the luxury watch brand Hublot.)
In many ways, the Esquire Singapore cover story perfectly captures the precarious position that magazines are in today. And it may be a sign of a bigger, more terrible shift to come in the Big Celebrity Machine: soon celebrities will simply license their images to brands and magazines, so that they can legally generate new promotional images and cover spreads to run in social media campaigns or in print, at no inconvenience to the star themselves. The celebrity’s PR team can feed an interviewer’s questions into their custom LLMs, and send those already PR-approved responses over email back to the magazine, so that the magazine can avoid the whole trouble of generating the interview answers themselves.
The most striking bit from the Esquire Singapore interview with Mackenyu is when he is “asked” about how he deals with disillusionment. His “answer”:
“Disillusionment happens when you lose sight of why you started. Doing the simple things reminds me that this is a job I chose, and love.”
Losing sight of why you started—that seems to be happening to too many folks in the media industry these days.
FURTHER READING: