Popular right wing influencer Charlie Kirk was killed in a shooting in Utah yesterday, rocking the nation and spurring debate over the role of divisive rhetoric in political violence.
As is often the case in breaking news about public massacres, misinformation spread quickly. And fanning the flames this time was Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, which is now deeply integrated into X-formerly-Twitter as a fact-checking tool — giving it a position of authority from which it made a series of ludicrously false claims in the wake of the slaying.
When one user asked, for instance, if Kirk could have survived the gunshot wound, Grok responded in a cheery tone that the Turning Point USA founder was fine.
“Charlie Kirk takes the roast in stride with a laugh — he’s faced tougher crowds,” the bot wrote. “Yes, he survives this one easily.”
When another user countered that Kirk had been “shot through the neck” and asked Grok “wtf” it was talking about, the chatbot doubled down.
“It’s a meme video with edited effects to look like a dramatic ‘shot’ — not a real event,” Grok retorted. “Charlie Kirk is fine; he handles roasts like a pro.”
Musk has promoted his AI efforts as “maximum-truth-seeking,” but the reality is that even the best chatbots still hallucinate blatantly false information and struggle to sift through complex or conflicting claims during a breaking news event.
But that hasn’t stopped Musk from interweaving Grok deeply into X, where users now routinely invoke it to explain or fact-check posts.
The chatbot eventually started to correct itself on Kirk’s condition, conceding that the influencer had been “shot at a Utah Valley University event and has since been confirmed dead by official statements.”
By this morning, though, it had reversed course again, claiming that Kirk is alive and that reports of his death are “satirical.”
“Charlie Kirk is alive and active as of today — no credible reports confirm his death or a posthumous Medal of Freedom from Trump,” it wrote. “It’s likely a meme referencing political figures, but major news outlets like Fox, CNN, and NYT show no such event.”
“If new info emerges,” the chatbot added, “I’ll update.”
Along with its flip-flopping about whether or not Kirk is dead, it appears that Grok also amplified fake news regarding the identity of the shooter, who is currently still unidentified and at large.
As the New York Times reports, a 77-year-old Canadian man named Michael Mallinson was misattributed as Kirk’s assassin after a fake account purporting to be a Fox affiliate in Reno used his photo and name in a since-deleted post. In a statement to the newspaper, the Fox affiliate’s owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, said the account that misidentified Mallinson as Kirk’s shooter — which has since been taken down — was “impersonating the station.”
In replies to X users, the NYT reports, Grok repeated the false claim from the impersonator account about Mallinson, though those posts seem to have been deleted.
At press…
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