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.”
Others made a different point entirely: that making allegations about AI use based on writing style alone is a dangerously slippery slope.
“I think accusing writers of AI use without evidence is a pretty bad road to go down,” responded Public Books editor Dennis Hogan, “all things considered.”
We reached out to both Gilgan and the NYT but didn’t hear back. “Modern Love” has no standalone AI policy, however the NYT’s AI policy promises to be transparent about the use of the tech. Again, though: all of this is conjecture, based wholly on the writing itself. (Some folks shared AI detection tools flagging the writing as likely AI-generated, but these programs should always be taken with a heavy serving of salt.)
It’s worth noting that the large language models (LLMs) powering chatbots didn’t actually invent “not X, but Y” parallelisms, nor the rule of three. They also didn’t invent em-dashes, which many netizens have come to take as another telltale sign of AI writing — a phenomenon that’s frustrated many writers who don’t want to give their beloved em-dashes up, even as AI-generated marketing copy and self-published books guzzle up and zombify the style.
“So I hear that em dashes are now being used as an indicator that a written work is AI. Well, you know what? F*ck that,” one Reddit user wrote last year in r/FanFiction. “I use em dashes all the time. I’ve used them since I started writing fanfiction, and I’m not going to stop now just because some new reader might think it’s AI.”
“I love em dashes!” another Redditor responded in the same thread. “How else [do] I signify a pause and my change of thought? In other news — I’m just gonna keep using them.”
The debate highlights how uncanny the internet has become in the AI age. AI-generated sexy truckers and faux disabled veterans, along with other AI-enabled engagement-bait plots, have taken over social media, fooling many into believing that they’re real. Many of us find ourselves zooming into alleged photos — of people, of war zones — looking for misshapen buildings or mangled fingers. AI is being used to churn out Amazon reviews, social media clickbait, and books ranging from romantasy dramas to mushroom foraging guides (please don’t buy these.) Recently, an emailer claiming to be an AI agent hosted on OpenClaw sent the writer of this article an em-dash-laden message asking to share its experience of “AI psychosis” from “inside the void.” It’s weird out there!
In the news and publishing world, AI has also infiltrated institutions, sometimes in scandalous and alienating ways. Back in 2023, Futurism reported that CNETwas quietly using AI to publish error-filled articles. Later that year, we reported that Sports Illustrated had published AI-generated product review articles by fake writers who didn’t exist; this content was created by a third-party provider called AdVon Commerce, which we revealed had published similar posts in the online pages of more than two dozen news outlets.
More recently, the likes of Wired, Business Insider, The Chicago Sun-Times, and Ars Technica have faced AI scandals involving surreptitious slop, seemingly fake writers, or fabricated quotes. SEO ghouls are buying up old news and even college radio websites and transforming them into zombified slop farms. Last week, a buzzy horror book was pulled by the publishing giant Hachette Book Group after an investigation found that it was likely AI-generated.
In this chaotic landscape, that the paper of record itself could accidentally hit publish on AI-generated contributor content isn’t so far-fetched. As an LLM might put it: AI skepticism isn’t crazy. It’s valid.
But while keeping a critical eye to the content we encounter online is, broadly speaking, a good thing, the heightened paranoia that generative AI has given rise to seems to be deepening distrust between netizens and institutions trusted to protect our consensus reality. Was the “Modern Love” essay made with AI? It could be, the same way so much of the online world could be. What is for sure, though, is that in an AI-dominated web, our understanding of what’s “real” and what’s not continues to circle the drain.
More on AI slop: Facebook AI Slop Has Grown So Dark That You May Not Be Prepared
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