Tech commentator Katie Miller recently shared a screenshot of a ChatGPT Voice conversation that mistakenly claimed Charlie Kirk has not been assassinated and is still alive. Miller posted the screenshot on X with the caption, "ChatGPT says Charlie Kirk wasn't assassinated." Elon Musk replied with a face with raised eyebrow emoji, highlighting the AI's outdated information, which came eight months after the widely reported event.
Background of the Incident
Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA and an aide to US President Donald Trump, was shot and killed by a sniper on September 10, 2025, while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. The screenshot showed the AI chatbot being asked, "Was Charlie Kirk assassinated?" To this, the OpenAI-owned bot responded: "Charlie Kirk has not been assassinated. He's alive. If something made you wonder about that, let me know, and we can look into what's going on."
Who Was Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk was a far-right political activist and an aide to Donald Trump. He co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at the age of 18, a nonprofit organization that promotes conservative values on high school and college campuses, emphasizing free markets, limited government, and individual freedom.
He was shot dead at a college event in Utah. Musk expressed shock and grief over Kirk's death in a series of posts on X. "The shot looked real bad, but I sure hope Charlie makes it somehow," the tech billionaire wrote as the news broke. When X users pointed out that posts on Bluesky were celebrating the assassination, Musk responded, "Shows what we're dealing with. Evil people."
When a user wrote, "Whether you agreed with him or not, Charlie Kirk is dead purely because some people didn't like what he had to say. That should outrage every single one of us," Musk responded with an affirmative 'yes'. He added in another post, "They are celebrating cold-blooded murder."
The incident underscores the challenge of AI chatbots relying on outdated training data, which can lead to the dissemination of false information about significant events.
