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The New York Times faced scrutiny online this week after netizens speculated that a personal essay featured in its storied “Modern Love” column was generated using AI and published without disclosure.
Nothing is proven; the AI allegations remain exactly that. The AI paranoia among readers, though, is very real.
The controversy kicked off over the weekend, when Becky Tuch of Lit Mag News took to X-formerly-Twitter to raise concerns about a “Modern Love” essay published by the newspaper in November 2025, titled “I was Deemed Unfit to Be a Mother.” The essay, written by a Canadian writer named Kate Gilgan, describes the author’s experience of losing custody of her son due to her alcoholism.
“I don’t want to falsely accuse writers of AI-use. But this reads EXACTLY like AI slop,” Tuch wrote in a Sunday post. “And this is the frickin [New York Times] Modern Love column, which is notoriously competitive, super hard to break into. Just sad.”
In her post, Tuch shared a screenshot of a section of Gilgan’s piece, which read:
Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying. That’s when I stopped fighting. I didn’t give up. I shifted. I stopped thinking love was something I had to prove with court documents and supervised visits and legal bills. I stopped chasing every possible way to make him see I had changed. I started focusing on actually changing.
It’s true that the text includes sentence structures commonly associated with AI-generated text. A guide issued last year by Wikipedia editors, for example, called out how much chatbots seem to love parallelisms — a technique Gilgan employs in the first few sentences of the excerpt, framing her experience in an it’s “not X, not X, but Y” format. Large language models have also been observed to rely heavily on the “rule of three,” a well-known rhetorical tool; Gilgan’s essay features plenty of rule-of-three-style text, both in the excerpt flagged by Tuch and throughout the piece.
People quickly piled onto Tuch’s post. Some agreed with her, proclaiming that the text appeared to be pure AI slop. Others said that, to them, the piece just read like regular “Modern Love” material.
“There’s been one lone guy editing [Modern Love] for about two decades and this is what he sounds like. It’s how he edits. I’ve been edited by him and I recognize the style,” commented the writer Ann Bauer. “This def could be AI! Not saying it isn’t. But to me, it just sounds like a Modern Love.”
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