{"id":10112,"date":"2026-04-09T14:06:48","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/kate-gilgan-ai-new-york-times\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T14:06:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:06:48","slug":"kate-gilgan-ai-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/kate-gilgan-ai-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"We Talked to a Writer Accused of Publishing An AI-Generated Essay in The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Was AI used to produce a personal essay that wound up in the pages of the New York Times<\/em>? The answer is complicated.<\/p>\n

The writer Kate Gilgan found herself at the center of a literary scandal<\/a> last month when, on social media, another writer accused her<\/a> of using AI to write an emotional first-person essay<\/a> about the experience of losing custody of her young son at the height of her alcoholism. The piece had been published in the NYT\u2019s <\/em>famously competitive \u201cModern Love\u201d column back in October; the accusations were made without any hard evidence, and the writer who accused Gilgan of using AI, The Lit Mag\u2019s<\/em> Becky Tuch, pointed only to the style of Gilgan\u2019s 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Gilgan is pretty offline, she told Futurism<\/em> \u2014\u00a0so it wasn\u2019t until journalists started asking her about the controversy that she realized there was one at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m actually not on Twitter or X or whatever that is,\u201d said Gilgan, who spoke to us from her home in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. But she \u201cwasn\u2019t that worried,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause AI wasn\u2019t used to generate that content.\u201d<\/p>\n

That contention, it turns out, is a bit semantic. As Gilgan conceded to The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, she did make use of a variety of chatbots \u2014 ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity \u2014 for conceptualizing and editing the piece, though she denied copying and pasting anything directly from an AI into her essay.<\/p>\n

The situation, in other words, is messy. Though the AI accusations against her were unsubstantiated at first \u2014 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 \u2014 it turned out that readers were right to be suspicious, since AI did have a prominent hand in the creation of the piece.<\/p>\n

The controversy comes at an intensifying moment for the literary world\u2019s ongoing struggle with AI. Institutional scandals<\/a> continue to abound<\/a> \u2014\u00a0within the same two-week span as the allegations against Gilgan emerged, the publishing giant Hachette pulled<\/a> a buzzy new horror novel over suspicion<\/a> of substantial AI use, and the NYT<\/em> cut all ties<\/a> with a book critic after it was discovered that his usage of AI had resulted in the newspaper publishing a significantly plagiarized book review \u2014\u00a0while some writers and journalists are starting to open up<\/a> about their sometimes very extensive<\/a> use of AI.<\/p>\n

To unpack it all, I wanted to talk to Gilgan myself \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

In an interview, Gilgan maintained that the idea that she published AI slop in \u201cModern Love\u201d is false. But she did use chatbots to help her craft a piece specifically for publication in the column, and there\u2019s no question that it ended up with the distinctive argot of AI.\u00a0One thing was clear: AI use has turned into one of the most contentious topics in the literary community.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was going back and reading a lot of my earlier pieces \u2014\u00a0I guess, maybe intuitively, I was wondering, \u2018Oh, my God, has that happened? Has AI changed my voice?’\u201d Gilgan told me. But \u201cI don\u2019t think I actually worried about it, because I haven\u2019t used it to that extent.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Gilgan started taking getting published seriously about ten years ago, she told us, writing about extremely personal topics like an extramarital affair<\/a> she\u2019d had and her family\u2019s experience of being trapped in Bali<\/a> during the pandemic. And even before that, about 15 years ago, she tried \u2014\u00a0and failed \u2014\u00a0to write a memoir about the same experience she later explored in her \u201cModern Love\u201d piece: losing custody of her young son due to alcoholism.<\/p>\n

The problem? It wasn\u2019t any good, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was so full of self-pity and histrionic emotional grandeur; it was just awful,\u201d said Gilgan. \u201cAnd so I stopped writing it and set it down\u2026 it just wasn\u2019t working.\u201d <\/p>\n

A few years ago, she decided she wanted to revisit the custody battle and her subsequent path to sobriety,\u00a0but this time as a novel.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gave me more freedom,\u201d said Gilgan. She finally finished her first draft about a year ago; the non-fiction essay published in \u201cModern Love,\u201d she says, was born from that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis essay then came out of that novel,\u201d Gilgan said. Distilling it into a shorter essay, she thought, might help her get her book published. \u201cI thought, \u2018Okay, I\u2019m going to try and leverage this. I\u2019m going to try and market the essay to try and help bring my book to publication.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilgan was strategic. She turned to chatbots, which she says she started playing around with about two or so years ago, to help her craft her essay in a way that she believed would appeal to the NYT<\/em>\u2018s \u201cModern Love\u201d editorial staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cRather than sitting on Google reading through tons of other people\u2019s articles about how to get published in \u2018Modern Love\u2019 and \u2018here\u2019s what Dan Jones looks for,’\u201d said Gilgan, referring to the column\u2019s longtime editor, \u201cI asked AI, \u2018Okay, boil this down for me. Take everything \u2014\u00a0every scrap of information on the internet that you can find \u2014 to help me get this essay published in the Times<\/em>.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilgan used a mix of chatbots throughout the process, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe homeschool our kids, so we\u2019ve always got laptops open around the house,\u201d she explained. \u201cOne will have ChatGPT on it, and one will have Copilot on it. Or if I\u2019m using my cell phone, whatever happens to be on it is what I\u2019ll use. I don\u2019t have any go-tos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though she holds that she didn\u2019t use AI to generate any \u201cnew ideas,\u201d as she put it, she says she did lean on the tech as a \u201cfirst reader,\u201d by running and re-running her writing through chatbots and asking questions about how best construct her piece to suit her mission: publication.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the bits of feedback I got from AI was, \u2018Okay, you\u2019re going to have to really focus on a tight story arc.\u2019 Okay, I need to do that. So if I get that feedback, I go back to my essay and I start rewriting, start shifting things around,\u201d said Gilgan. \u201cThere were a lot of questions I asked it about, \u2018Does this sound too histrionic? Am I just making my case that my ex-husband was the only problem?’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI used it to help me stay rational and unemotional about a really emotional topic,\u201d she continued, adding that there\u2019s a \u201cfine line in writing first-person narrative where you\u2019re relatable but you\u2019re not \u2018terminally unique\u2019 in your emotions \u2014 I used [AI] to help me balance that.\u201d (In that way, Gilgan said, she leaned on AI the same way she asked questions of her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor throughout the writing process; chatbots, she said, are almost like having her sponsor \u201cavailable, on my phone with me\u201d at all times.)<\/p>\n

This process, however, led to some accusing Gilgan of smuggling full-on undisclosed AI slop into the pages of the paper of record.<\/p>\n

Asked what she makes of this indictment of her writing style, and if she believes leaning on AI for the \u201cModern Love\u201d piece significantly altered her voice as a writer, she laughed that the backlash simply speaks to her technical ability \u2014\u00a0and insisted that while her writing style has \u201cmatured\u201d since she was first published in 2017, she doesn\u2019t believe AI has fundamentally transformed her writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first it was like, \u2018Oh my god,’\u201d she recounted. \u201cAnd then it\u2019s like, \u2018But I\u2019m just a technically proficient writer.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the issues seems to be things around disclosure: \u2018How much was AI used? Did it generate content? My direct answer to that question is: no more so than an editor would generate content for me,\u201d Gilgan contended. \u201cAn editor is going to realistically rewrite a sentence or two for me. They\u2019re not going to insert a sentence into my piece, but they are going to rephrase. They\u2019re going to shift the wording. They\u2019re going to use some synonyms in there, that sort of thing. But they\u2019re not going to come up with a sentence all on their own. And it was the same with this.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In March, asked about the online controversy stemming from Gilgan\u2019s \u201cModern Love\u201d essay, the NYT <\/em>told Futurism <\/em>that journalism at the newspaper \u201cis inherently a human endeavor,\u201d and \u201cthat will not change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs technology evolves, we are consistently assessing best practices for our newsroom,\u201d a spokesperson for the paper added. <\/p>\n

When we first started emailing, Gilgan referred to AI as a new \u201ctool\u201d in her workflow. She also compared AI to using a typewriter instead of a computer, or relying on a thesaurus. When I suggested that many writers might recoil from the characterization of chatbots as a \u201ctool\u201d like any other, given that it does have the capacity to both wholesale generate and drastically transform a piece of text in a radically different way than any previous technologies have been capable of, she insisted that AI can\u2019t replace the role of a human editor.<\/p>\n

And if she didn\u2019t want to actually write, she added, she just wouldn\u2019t be a writer.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there a risk with AI? Absolutely,\u201d said Gilgan. \u201cIf I want to be lazy about my writing, yeah \u2014\u00a0AI could do it all for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for the sake of her own sense of integrity, she added, \u201cI hope I don\u2019t ever get that lazy that I just hand it over to AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI and media: <\/strong>NYT Cuts Ties With Writer as Scrutiny of AI Content Grows<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post We Talked to a Writer Accused of Publishing An AI-Generated Essay in The New York Times<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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