Esquire Singapore found a way to interview Mackenyu despite his absence.
Esquire Singapore magazine published an interview with actor Mackenyu, known for his role as Roronoa Zoro in Netflix's One Piece adaptation, despite the actor himself not participating in the conversation. Instead, the editors used neural networks trained on his past statements.
Initially, the interview was planned as a regular meeting as part of the second season's promotion. However, Mackenyu was unable to participate due to his busy schedule. As a result, the editors decided to "get creative" and generated answers using Claude and Copilot, based on the actor's quotes from previous materials.
The text itself is accompanied by a note that it was created using AI and edited by humans. However, the content raises questions. The "answers" turned out to be vague, lacking specifics, and often sound like typical AI formulations without context.
The greatest outrage was caused by a fragment in which the AI version of the actor reflects on his late father, Sonny Chiba, who played Hattori Hanzo in "Kill Bill." The text talks about the pressure of having to live up to his level and the desire to earn his approval.
Kotaku reached out to Mackenyu's representative to clarify whether the actor had given consent to such actions, but, as noted in the publication, "given that he never responded to Esquire's email, it's fair to assume that the actor did not consent to this pointless endeavor." The material itself has not yet been removed and remains in open access.
