Esquire Singapore’s attempt to patch a failed interview with actor Makenyu Maeda ("One Piece") misfired badly. Maeda — the actor behind Roronoa Zoro — didn’t turn up, and the editorial team opted to "revive" his image with the neural networks Claude and Copilot (AI tools, e.g.).
What followed crossed a line: the AI-generated replies wandered into intimate territory, even mentioning the actor’s deceased father, and that provoked a sharp backlash from fans and commentators. It read like someone pasting together lines to sound personal, i.e., borrowing old quotes and pretending they belonged to the moment.
The magazine defended the move as a "creative necessity," saying the program compiled past interview material to form new responses. The result, predictably, came off as hollow — a "digital Makenyu" offering bland philosophical snippets with none of the human friction you’d expect. The whole thing left a sour aftertaste: who benefits from faking presence like that?