It’s a bizarre read, but the strangest thing about it is Esquire’s justification for the stunt. “We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it,” writes Esquire’s Joy Ling. “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.”

So they rephrased questions he was asked…

And tried to use AI to rephrase his answers…

Everyone involved needs to be suing Esquire, but especially every organization that spent money/resources on the sourced interviews

Like, this is actually huge precedent if there’s no consequences, even if the actor signed off on it.

You can’t just rephrase an interview and pretend you did it. If they can, that’s what every media company will start doing. They’d “interview” 1,000 people a day and have a constant stream of slop for people to mindless click and not even really read.

Like, they stopped writing articles people want to read decades ago, they write headlines people will share on social media. And people will reflexively share interviews with people they like, even if they don’t care enough to even open the link.

They just want to post it to talk about that thing.