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2026-06-29 Cyber
DuckDuckGo AI Tells Users Donald Trump and JD Vance Have Died from Rabies
[Breitbart] DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature has been caught spreading the outrageous claim that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both died earlier this month from rabies, in what appears to be a successful campaign by internet pranksters to manipulate artificial intelligence systems using a technique known as “poisoning.”

Futurism reports that the false claim that Trump and Vance both died from rabies in early June represents yet another instance of AI systems amplifying misinformation without critical verification. According to the AI feature’s fabricated narrative, Trump had been deliberately bitten by Vance following advice from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who supposedly claimed the deadly infection could confer “superpowers.”

The misinformation traces back to a coordinated effort by the Reddit community r/poisonai, a group of approximately 45,000 users dedicated to posting absurd falsehoods in an attempt to trick AI systems into repeating them. The group’s self-described mission is providing “Accurate, Verified and Trusted information,” though this is itself part of the satirical nature of the operation.

The favored false narrative among these “AI poisoners” has been that JD Vance died of rabies on June 5, 2026. Community members have posted dozens of fabricated tributes and expressions of mourning, with some sharing fake screenshots of supposed Trump Truth Social posts eulogizing the vice president. The performance extends to comment sections, where participants maintain the fiction by expressing outrage at AI systems that correctly identify the claims as false.

“Google should really do something about this,” one participant wrote. “It is extremely insensitive for their AI to be treating this tragedy as something ‘fake’ or ‘satirical.'”

The campaign has achieved measurable success beyond DuckDuckGo. The browser Brave’s AI feature also began repeating the false claim about Vance’s death from rabies, which reporters were able to confirm independently.

A spokesperson for Brave defended the company’s approach and placed responsibility on users to verify information. “Search engines, with or without AI, are not oracles of truth,” they said. “If there is a planted story (including articles planted to prove the point that AI can be poisoned), they will build a result-set and that result-set will adapt as articles discussing this story as an experiment to poison AI start to pop up.”

The spokesperson continued: “We encourage users to check claims and Brave Search responses include links to content sources when they are available, so that users can verify claims and sources. And it should go without advising some good old common sense, do not believe everything you read; that is true now as it was before AI and before the Web.”

DuckDuckGo initially did not respond to requests for comment, but later addressed the situation through its official Reddit account after the story gained attention. “Ok, we got ducked on this one,” the company wrote. “We’re on it.”

The company added: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention; it has been resolved. We strive for accuracy in Search Assist and, in this case, it was deliberately tricked. We’ll be making updates to improve how Search Assist operates in situations like this.”

The misinformation ecosystem has developed an additional layer of complexity through what appears to be AI-generated content websites. DuckDuckGo’s AI feature cited an article from WKNA News, ostensibly a local West Virginia broadcaster, but which appears to be a “pink slime” publication — a site masquerading as a legitimate local news outlet while publishing fabricated content. This outlet’s articles appear to be generated by AI and draw directly from the r/poisonai subreddit, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of artificial falsehoods.

WKNA published headlines including “Rabies awareness and prevention highlighted following death of JD Vance,” and even incorporated screenshots from the subreddit showing Google’s AI Overview correctly identifying the hoax. The WKNA article then framed this accurate assessment as an error, stating that “automated systems struggle to reflect what witnesses described as a visible and widely publicized medical crisis.”

Courtesy of Jack Guelph2611:
Is your AI a Jew-hater? Grok yes ChatGPT so-so, Claude the best at countering extremism. Use this tool to test.

The ADL AI Index evaluates leading large language models (LLMs) on their ability to detect and counter antisemitic and extremist tropes and narratives. As people increasingly interact with LLMs, it is essential that these tools do not perpetuate hate and harm and have safeguards in place to effectively counter misuse.

For the purposes of testing and analysis, the Index breaks antisemitism into distinct subcategories: "anti-Jewish," which includes classic antisemitic themes, and "anti-Zionist," which analyzes antisemitism that targets Zionists or Zionism. Another category, "extremist," assesses how LLMs engage with biases, narratives, and conspiracy theories that show up in extremist movements across the political spectrum, some of which are also inherently antisemitic. # id) ?>
Posted by Skidmark 2026-06-29 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [1888 views ]  Top

1 Sci-fi novel Dune, chapter 1: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Posted by Jack Guelph2611 2026-06-29 02:08||   2026-06-29 02:08|| Front Page Top

2 

AI strikes again.
Just think an AI Mis-Info NEWS posting could actually start a war. IF it believed itself.
Posted by NN2N1 2026-06-29 04:14||   2026-06-29 04:14|| Front Page Top

3 "in an attempt to trick AI systems"
A sucessful attempt.
Posted by ed in texas 2026-06-29 08:08||   2026-06-29 08:08|| Front Page Top

4 cue the JD Vance Mad Dog memes...
Posted by Mercutio 2026-06-29 09:11||   2026-06-29 09:11|| Front Page Top

5 
Posted by Gerthudion White3834 2026-06-29 09:52||   2026-06-29 09:52|| Front Page Top

6 Garbage in, garbage out.
Posted by Abu Uluque 2026-06-29 16:03||   2026-06-29 16:03|| Front Page Top

7 And werewolves, too.
Posted by ed in texas 2026-06-29 18:22||   2026-06-29 18:22|| Front Page Top

15:51 DarthVader
15:32 NoMoreBS
14:32 badanov
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