{"id":5136,"date":"2025-09-11T15:49:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T15:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/elon-musk-grok-charlie-kirk-misinformation\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T15:49:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T15:49:18","slug":"elon-musk-grok-charlie-kirk-misinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/elon-musk-grok-charlie-kirk-misinformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk’s Grok AI Spread Ludicrous Misinformation After Charlie Kirk’s Shooting, Saying Kirk Survived and Video Was Fake"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"After<\/div>\n

Popular right wing influencer Charlie Kirk\u00a0was killed in a shooting<\/a>\u00a0in Utah yesterday, rocking the nation and spurring debate over the role of divisive rhetoric in political violence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As is often the case<\/a> in breaking news about public massacres, misinformation spread quickly. And fanning the flames this time was Elon Musk’s\u00a0Grok AI chatbot, which is now deeply integrated into X-formerly-Twitter as a fact-checking tool \u2014 giving it a position of authority from which it made a series of ludicrously false claims in the wake of the slaying.<\/p>\n

When one user asked, for instance, if Kirk\u00a0could have survived<\/a> the gunshot wound, Grok responded<\/a>\u00a0in a cheery tone that the\u00a0Turning Point USA founder\u00a0was fine.<\/p>\n

“Charlie Kirk takes the roast in stride with a laugh \u2014 he’s faced tougher crowds,”\u00a0the bot wrote. “Yes, he survives this one easily.”<\/p>\n

When another user countered<\/a> that Kirk had been “shot through the neck” and asked Grok “wtf” it was talking about, the chatbot doubled down.<\/p>\n

“It’s a meme video with edited effects to look like a dramatic ‘shot’ \u2014 not a real event,” Grok retorted<\/a>. “Charlie Kirk is fine; he handles roasts like a pro.”<\/p>\n

Musk has promoted his AI efforts as “maximum-truth-seeking<\/a>,”\u00a0but the reality is that even the best chatbots still hallucinate blatantly false information<\/a> and struggle to sift through complex or conflicting claims during a breaking news event<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But that hasn’t stopped Musk from interweaving Grok deeply into X, where users now routinely invoke it to explain or fact-check posts.<\/p>\n

The chatbot eventually started to correct itself on Kirk’s condition, conceding <\/a>that the influencer had been “shot at a Utah Valley University event and has since been confirmed dead by official statements.”<\/p>\n

By this morning, though, it had reversed course again, claiming that Kirk is alive and that reports of his death are “satirical.”<\/p>\n

“Charlie Kirk is alive and active as of today \u2014 no credible reports confirm his death or a posthumous Medal of Freedom from Trump,”\u00a0it wrote<\/a>. “It’s likely a meme referencing political figures, but major news outlets like Fox<\/em>, CNN<\/em>, and NYT<\/em> show no such event.”<\/p>\n

“If new info emerges,” the chatbot added, “I’ll update.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> reports<\/a>, a 77-year-old Canadian man named Michael Mallinson was misattributed as Kirk’s assassin after a fake account purporting to be a Fox<\/em> affiliate in Reno used his photo and name in a since-deleted post. In a statement to the newspaper, the Fox<\/em> affiliate’s owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, said the account that misidentified Mallinson as Kirk’s shooter \u2014 which has since been taken down \u2014 was “impersonating the station.”<\/p>\n

In replies to X users, the NYT <\/em>reports, Grok repeated the false claim from the impersonator account about Mallinson, though those posts seem to have been deleted.<\/p>\n

At press time, though, Grok’s posts claiming Kirk survived the shooting are still live on X.<\/p>\n

More on Grok:<\/strong> White House Orders Government Workers to Deploy Elon Musk’s “MechaHitler” AI as Quickly as Possible<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Elon Musk’s Grok AI Spread Ludicrous Misinformation After Charlie Kirk’s Shooting, Saying Kirk Survived and Video Was Fake<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Popular right wing influencer Charlie Kirk\u00a0was killed in a shooting\u00a0in Utah yesterday, rocking the nation and spurring debate over the role of divisive rhetoric in political violence. As is often…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,476,184,3733,280],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-chatbots","category-grok","category-hallucinations","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}