With a fire hose of misinformation surrounding the assassination of US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, social media users have turned to AI chatbots for reliable updates -- only to encounter contradictory or inaccurate responses, further fueling online confusion.

The trend highlights how chatbots often generate confident responses, even when verified information is unavailable during fast-developing news events, energizing misinformation across platforms that have largely scaled back human fact-checking and content moderation.

A day after Kirk, a 31-year-old prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was fatally gunned down at a university in Utah, the X account of AI chatbot Perplexity falsely stated that the activist was never shot and was "still alive," according to the watchdog News

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