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Was AI used to produce a personal essay that wound up in the pages of the New York Times? The answer is complicated.
The writer Kate Gilgan found herself at the center of a literary scandal last month when, on social media, another writer accused her of using AI to write an emotional first-person essay about the experience of losing custody of her young son at the height of her alcoholism. The piece had been published in the NYT’s famously competitive “Modern Love” column back in October; the accusations were made without any hard evidence, and the writer who accused Gilgan of using AI, The Lit Mag’s Becky Tuch, pointed only to the style of Gilgan’s article as evidence. Others quickly piled on, and soon much of literary social media was swarming with speculation and analyses via AI content detectors (which, we should note, are known to be unreliable.)
Gilgan is pretty offline, she told Futurism — so it wasn’t until journalists started asking her about the controversy that she realized there was one at all.
“I’m actually not on Twitter or X or whatever that is,” said Gilgan, who spoke to us from her home in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. But she “wasn’t that worried,” she said, “because AI wasn’t used to generate that content.”
That contention, it turns out, is a bit semantic. As Gilgan conceded to The Atlantic, she did make use of a variety of chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity — for conceptualizing and editing the piece, though she denied copying and pasting anything directly from an AI into her essay.
The situation, in other words, is messy. Though the AI accusations against her were unsubstantiated at first — they were based simply on certain rhetorical devices that chatbot-generated writing is known to favor, and which the public is clearly starting to be on the lookout for — it turned out that readers were right to be suspicious, since AI did have a prominent hand in the creation of the piece.
The controversy comes at an intensifying moment for the literary world’s ongoing struggle with AI. Institutional scandals continue to abound — within the same two-week span as the allegations against Gilgan emerged, the publishing giant Hachette pulled a buzzy new horror novel over suspicion of substantial AI use, and the NYT cut all ties with a book critic after it was discovered that his usage of AI had resulted in the newspaper publishing a significantly plagiarized book review — while some writers and journalists are starting to open up about their sometimes very extensive use of AI.
To unpack it all, I wanted to talk to Gilgan myself — about how she used AI, what it means when a machine becomes a collaborator in the creative process, and where writers should draw the line.
In an interview, Gilgan maintained that the idea that she published AI slop in “Modern Love” is false. But she did use chatbots to help her craft a piece specifically for publication in the column, and there’s no question that it ended up with the distinctive argot of AI. One thing was clear: AI use has turned into one of the most contentious topics in the literary community.
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