Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo Mary Salen/Getty Images
Recently, I Googled my own name. I sometimes do this for perhaps an odd reason: to find photos of myself and my late father, the actor Peter Boyle. A search for me usually churns up old pictures of us together — sometimes images I’ve never seen, revealing moments I’d forgotten, like a photo of us at an Addams Family screening in matchy-matchy puffer coats or an FAO Schwarz event in the late ’80s, my mouth agape at attending a party inside a toy store and my dad resigned, sweetly schlepping the swag bag with one arm in a sling.
Skimming through the results this time, though, I came across an odd headline. “Lucy Boyle: A Legacy of Talent, Intellect, and Quiet Success in American Arts and Culture,” declared a website called Todays Magazine. Puzzled, I clicked. It looked like a typical celebrity puff piece, only the pictures were not of a celebrity — they were of me. Me, whose success thus far has been so quiet only dogs can hear it. Dogs and now maybe the robots that are quietly writing up to 50 percent of the articles on the internet. As I scrolled down, an uncanny valley of prose opened up before me and it became clear: I’d been slopped. Nepo-slopped.
“Lucy Boyle’s life story offers a compelling counter-narrative to the typical Hollywood legacy arc,” intoned the first paragraph. The overblown style applied to my relatively minor nepo-baby status made me laugh out loud. My dad had played the tap-dancing monster in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein and Ray’s dad on the ’90s sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, along with a number of other beloved character roles. I, on the other hand, went to grad school for acting, graduated six months before my dad’s death in 2006, and moved out to Los Angeles for my first pilot season hobbled by grief. A couple of years later, I threw in the towel, moved back east, and devoted myself to writing, though I knew it wasn’t exactly an easier path. Or, as the article put it: “Born into fame yet raised with restraint, she exemplifies how creative inheritance can coexist with independence.”
Baffled by this AI-generated version of my life, I went down the rabbit hole. I found pieces about me on sites with names like Daily Celebs and Binge Saga. The latter claimed to have the “Untold Story” about me, an account that included particularly daffy word salads such as “Her childhood lifestyle helped her understand creativity not as a performance but as a lived experience.” Another site paired its slop with pictures of two different people, one a little girl and one a 20-something woman, neither of whom are me. All of the sites had no compunction about posting private information like my weight and birth date — made-up but nonetheless publicly stated as fact.
And it wasn’t just me. Across various sites was a vast universe of AI-generated drivel about every kind of nepo relation you could imagine. Parents, siblings, spouses, and ex-spouses of even minor celebrities were featured with SEO-optimized headlines like “Who is Simon Luckinbill? The Real Life of Lucille Ball’s Grandson” and “Who is Shamicka Gibbs? The Untold Story of Martin Lawrence’s Ex-Wife, Her Net Worth, Family, and Career.” Want to curl up with a deep dive on Jack Nicholson’s daughter? How about his unacknowledged biological son? Or every single person he’s related to? At times, the pieces seemed to pull from each other, creating a mise en abyme of celebrity kin, a hall of mirrors with more nepos than a royal wedding at Versailles.
Reading through the endless entries, I discovered that nepo slop as a literary genre has several hallmarks. A hagiographic tone, honed by AI’s well-documented sycophancy, runs through all of these stories. The relentless flattery also has the advantage of ensuring subjects probably won’t, or can’t, sue for defamation. Another common trope: the idealization of nepos who shun the spotlight, elevating the Nick Carraways of the world over the Gatsbys. The piece “Who is Kel Geddes? All about Anne Geddes’s Husband and His Life Story” praises the spouse of the baby photographer because he is “not known for his flashy celebrity behavior.” But the bots’ preference for lesser-known nepos may have a practical component too: Without widespread media coverage of the subjects, the claims are less easily checked.
Like mine, most articles contained errors, none more glaring than when, in the middle of a profile of Rowan Atkinson’s son, I clicked on yet another untold story: the tale of Charity Nye, daughter of Bill Nye the Science Guy. The pictures in this piece were particularly bizarre, showing Nye père and fille as a Dancing With the Stars couple. I clicked on another Charity profile and discovered a similar shot, but in this one, Nye’s features were warped by heavy AI retouching and the busty blonde claiming to be his daughter looked particularly uncanny. The article’s praise of Charity’s dedication to privacy reached new levels of hyperbole: This nepo was so elusive she spurred the bots to meditate on the nature of existence. One site opined that Charity’s “near-total absence from public life raises a broader question worth sitting with: does being related to someone famous obligate a person to also be public? Her example suggests the answer is no.” Reading this, I began to wonder: Was Charity so elusive because she was so classy — or because she didn’t exist?
A quick Google listed Charity as Bill’s only spawn, but any actual reporting on him did not. Digging deeper, I found interviews in which Nye says he never had children for fear of passing on a neurological condition called ataxia, which runs in his family. I checked multiple human sources and can confirm: Nye has no children. Charity appears to be a hallucination. AI had birthed its own nepo baby.
Though the articles — riddled with typos and errors — were obviously AI-generated, there had to be, I imagined, humans at the top of the chain. How had they found me? How had they created Charity? A friend who works in digital media theorized the anonymous slop-hurlers crouching at their devices were instructing AI agents to find highly searched celebrities and generate articles about their relations. Most nepo-slop pieces listed no author, but that first profile I’d discovered on Todays Magazine was allegedly authored by a man named Dale Brown.
In his profile picture, Dale appeared to be a smooth-pated zaddy in a leather jacket with an expertly lit smile, and his author bio claimed he was “a passionate blog writer and English journalist,” painting him a bit like a love interest in a Nancy Meyers movie. His beat covered everything from the lives of the nepos to “How long does it take to learn Flute as a beginner?” The social-media icons under his name didn’t work, though I did find a Facebook profile that listed three friends, two of whom were named things like SEO OptimizationCo and SEOFarmer. (The third was another “writer” on the site.)
I decided to write to Dale and tell him I was the Lucy Boyle whose quiet success in American arts and letters he found so noteworthy. I heard back within minutes. “Thank you so much for reaching out! It was incredibly exciting to hear that you found our article and took the time to connect with us,” Dale wrote. “We are truly honored by your interest.”
Shocked to get a response, I decided to ask point-blank if “he” was using AI. “When it comes to writing and gathering information, we absolutely leverage digital tools and AI to assist us,” Dale said. “However, we do not simply let AI write the content on its own. Instead, we use it as a helpful assistant [which] saves us an immense amount of time.” I then asked Dale where he’d worked during the “years of experience” mentioned in his bio and why his social-media links all led to error messages. Unsurprisingly, this was met with silence.
Feeling unsettled, I talked to Luke Arrigoni, the CEO of Loti AI, a start-up working to patrol the web to take down fake content, impersonators, and other unauthorized material about real people. He told me my friend’s theory about the genesis of these pieces was likely correct and, given their similarities, a single team of people could be training an AI agent to post different iterations of the same posts on various sites. He also warned me that seemingly harmless biographical information could be used for nefarious purposes. “I have a client who’s a happily married three-star general,” he told me, “whose Wikipedia entry kept getting changed to say he was divorced.” An impersonator apparently had been editing his page and posing as the supposedly newly divorced general on dating apps, asking women for explicit photos. Luke also explained the ins and outs of the laws concerning the online use of one’s NILV (name, image, likeness, and voice) and the many gray areas that make it difficult to get anything taken down without expert help.
I was amazed by the layers of fabrication. Writers who didn’t exist had created versions of me who also did not exist. The Lucy Boyles in these articles weren’t much more real than Charity Nye. But that may not matter for very long. “All of this data,” Arrigoni said, “is going to be scooped up by other LLMs” and whatever future models they release. There is a nonzero chance the slop becomes “factual renderings of people,” he added.
I thought about these fictional Lucy Boyles who might, at some point, fuse and become the real Lucy Boyle. I marveled at some of the wildly false claims in my slop — one article estimated my net worth to be between $1 million and $2 million, “modest compared to household Hollywood names” but reflective of my “selective artistic career.” Among the ludicrous takes, there was, I had to admit, something appealing about how the bots framed the arc of my life. “In an age defined by overexposure and constant digital presence,” one claimed, “Lucy Boyle’s journey feels both rare and refreshing.”
It was true that I was never good with the hustle, to the detriment of my career. Auditioning and networking were always sources of discomfort for me. But through the lens of AI, those early career travails were not-so-unconvincingly reframed as deliberate choices. “Quality over Quantity!” was how one article spun the two acting credits on my IMDb page. It turns out my dearth of gigs wasn’t because I was a bit adrift in my 20s but because I was so choosy with my roles. And I was an intellectual, full of integrity. One writer-bot named “Mark” was kinder to me than I’d ever been to myself: “Lucy Boyle’s story is a reminder that creativity does not always require the spotlight to shine brightly.”
Then I spotted Mark’s profile picture. It showed a smirking, tuxedo-wearing hunk, an image lifted straight from a Pinterest board for groomsmen. He didn’t have a last name, let alone a working email. Whatever human was behind “Mark” would remain a cipher. Meanwhile, the Lucy Boyle he’d created would live on: more dignified, more lauded, and, to anyone who actually knows her, unrecognizable.