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.

“I was going back and reading a lot of my earlier pieces — I guess, maybe intuitively, I was wondering, ‘Oh, my God, has that happened? Has AI changed my voice?'” Gilgan told me. But “I don’t think I actually worried about it, because I haven’t used it to that extent.”

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Gilgan started taking getting published seriously about ten years ago, she told us, writing about extremely personal topics like an extramarital affair she’d had and her family’s experience of being trapped in Bali during the pandemic. And even before that, about 15 years ago, she tried — and failed — to write a memoir about the same experience she later explored in her “Modern Love” piece: losing custody of her young son due to alcoholism.

The problem? It wasn’t any good, she said.

“It was so full of self-pity and histrionic emotional grandeur; it was just awful,” said Gilgan. “And so I stopped writing it and set it down… it just wasn’t working.”

A few years ago, she decided she wanted to revisit the custody battle and her subsequent path to sobriety, but this time as a novel.

“It gave me more freedom,” said Gilgan. She finally finished her first draft about a year ago; the non-fiction essay published in “Modern Love,” she says, was born from that.

“This essay then came out of that novel,” Gilgan said. Distilling it into a shorter essay, she thought, might help her get her book published. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to try and leverage this. I’m going to try and market the essay to try and help bring my book to publication.'”

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‘s “Modern Love” editorial staff.

“Rather than sitting on Google reading through tons of other people’s articles about how to get published in ‘Modern Love’ and ‘here’s what Dan Jones looks for,'” said Gilgan, referring to the column’s longtime editor, “I asked AI, ‘Okay, boil this down for me. Take everything — every scrap of information on the internet that you can find — to help me get this essay published in the Times.'”

Gilgan used a mix of chatbots throughout the process, she said.

“We homeschool our kids, so we’ve always got laptops open around the house,” she explained. “One will have ChatGPT on it, and one will have Copilot on it. Or if I’m using my cell phone, whatever happens to be on it is what I’ll use. I don’t have any go-tos.”

Though she holds that she didn’t use AI to generate any “new ideas,” as she put it, she says she did lean on the tech as a “first reader,” by running and re-running her writing through chatbots and asking questions about how best construct her piece to suit her mission: publication.

“One of the bits of feedback I got from AI was, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to really focus on a tight story arc.’ 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,” said Gilgan. “There were a lot of questions I asked it about, ‘Does this sound too histrionic? Am I just making my case that my ex-husband was the only problem?'”

“I used it to help me stay rational and unemotional about a really emotional topic,” she continued, adding that there’s a “fine line in writing first-person narrative where you’re relatable but you’re not ‘terminally unique’ in your emotions — I used [AI] to help me balance that.” (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 “available, on my phone with me” at all times.)

This process, however, led to some accusing Gilgan of smuggling full-on undisclosed AI slop into the pages of the paper of record.

Asked what she makes of this indictment of her writing style, and if she believes leaning on AI for the “Modern Love” piece significantly altered her voice as a writer, she laughed that the backlash simply speaks to her technical ability — and insisted that while her writing style has “matured” since she was first published in 2017, she doesn’t believe AI has fundamentally transformed her writing.

“At first it was like, ‘Oh my god,'” she recounted. “And then it’s like, ‘But I’m just a technically proficient writer.'”

“One of the issues seems to be things around disclosure: ‘How 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,” Gilgan contended. “An editor is going to realistically rewrite a sentence or two for me. They’re not going to insert a sentence into my piece, but they are going to rephrase. They’re going to shift the wording. They’re going to use some synonyms in there, that sort of thing. But they’re not going to come up with a sentence all on their own. And it was the same with this.”

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In March, asked about the online controversy stemming from Gilgan’s “Modern Love” essay, the NYT told Futurism that journalism at the newspaper “is inherently a human endeavor,” and “that will not change.”

“As technology evolves, we are consistently assessing best practices for our newsroom,” a spokesperson for the paper added.

When we first started emailing, Gilgan referred to AI as a new “tool” 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 “tool” 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’t replace the role of a human editor.

And if she didn’t want to actually write, she added, she just wouldn’t be a writer.

“Is there a risk with AI? Absolutely,” said Gilgan. “If I want to be lazy about my writing, yeah — AI could do it all for me.”

But for the sake of her own sense of integrity, she added, “I hope I don’t ever get that lazy that I just hand it over to AI.”

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