"Fun" with AI: questioning the RFK assassination
How do you turn a chatbot into a conspiracy theorist? Lead him there with undeniable facts and logical inferences
When you come to realize that much of your country’s history is a lie, one of the biggest downsides, beyond the psychological blow, is that you can’t discuss it much. Few share your perspective, and fewer still want to talk about it. It makes people uncomfortable. Because the mythology that underpins our social contract as Americans demands a level of unquestioning patriotism that’s instilled from preschool, you might as well be questioning people’s religion. It doesn’t matter how many facts you have at your disposal, if a person’s mind is closed to something he doesn’t want to hear, no amount of evidence will pry it open. The words on the screens and voices from the speakers, repeating comfortable lies like a mantra, always win out.
One of those lies is the accepted history of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. The incident was covered in American history courses in my youth as part of the terrible wave of American political assassinations of the 1960s, but so much has happened in our history in the last twenty years, I’m not sure if it still is. People know RFK, Jr., but his once much more famous father may not be a familiar figure to those below a certain age. So, here’s the gist of his famous assassination:
The Vietnam War had been raging for years, killing thousands upon thousands, and a significant segment of America’s youth was rebelling against authority in a way that had never happened in our history. Lyndon Johnson’s presidency had unraveled and he had announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. His fellow Democrat and political arch-enemy, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy, who had served as JFK’s (and, for a short time, Johnson’s) attorney general, was now a US Senator from New York. A relatively youthful and inspiring figure to many at only 42, he was fighting a winning campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to end the war in Vietnam and to alleviate poverty.
On the night of June 5, 1968, having won the critical California Democratic primary he was shot dead in a narrow kitchen pantry area at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after his victory speech. A 24-year-old Palestinian man named Sirhan Sirhan was grabbed and slammed down on a table, a .22-caliber pistol wrestled from his hand as he continued to fire in Kennedy’s direction. Mayhem ensued. Kennedy collapsed to the floor, still alive but mortally wounded by a bullet to the brain. Others had been shot but would survive.
Kennedy died in hospital the next day, his wife of 18 years widowed and his many children, including the son known today as RFK, Jr., then just 14, left without a father. The country was shell-shocked. His was the last in a string of high-profile assassinations that punctuated the turbulent 1960s — JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in ‘65, and within two months of each other, Martin Luther King, Jr. and RFK in ‘68.
Sirhan was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for Kennedy’s murder. His appointed defense attorney hadn’t contested the evidence against him, mostly witness testimonies and, crucially, a confession he later professed to have no memory of, opting for a mental incapacity defense. In 1972, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the US Supreme Court declared the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment and unconstitutional (temporarily, it turned out). He remains in prison to this day. He never disputed that he shot at RFK. Too many people witnessed him doing so. But he maintains that, despite the antipathy he felt for Kennedy for his role in approving fighter jets for Israel, he has no memory of the shooting and never has, and that he had been in some kind of a trance-like state.
This all seems a very open-and-shut case. But it’s not. As a kid, we were all taught, very matter-of-factly and, given his conviction, understandably, that Sirhan was Kennedy’s killer. But the acknowledged evidence, much of which was never presented at trial, showed that Sirhan could not have been RFK’s killer. It’s almost a certainty that none of the shots that passed through Kennedy’s body were fired by him, and it’s absolutely a certainty that the fatal shot was not. Many people who have examined the facts, including some of Kennedy’s family, have come firmly to the conclusion that someone else killed him. RFK, Jr. is one of them. Among others, author Lisa Pease does an excellent job of recounting the story and facts in minute detail in her book A Lie Too Big to Fail.
With all the inconvenient facts in mind, I decided that rather than torture my friends and acquaintances, I would amuse myself by letting loose on the well-known AI chatbot known as ChatGPT. I knew if I asked the general question of what the evidence was against Sirhan, I’d get a pretty standard answer. And I did, for the most part, although I was surprised that it acknowledged conflicting views on what had happened without prompting. But things got interesting when I began getting it to acknowledge, step by step, various contrary pieces of evidence in a series of leading questions, and then asking it whether it agreed that it was reasonable to draw certain conclusions from that evidence that are contrary from the accepted history.
ChatGPT, as opposed to some other AI chatbots like Google’s Gemini that aim to be somewhat concise, provides pretty detailed answers — too detailed in some cases. For the sake of brevity, I’m excerpting key parts of the exchange below, leaving out some parts I consider repetitive or less interesting, including some questions I asked that were a little off point. If you want to see the full, unedited exchange, however, you can find that here.
The screen shots below may appear too small to read on mobile devices, so if you’re interested, you may want to opt for the desktop version or the full exchange linked above, which appears larger. Also, because of the file sizes involved with the screen shots, subscribers reading this from their email inbox may find this article cut off past a certain point. The entire article is available here.
I’ll provide the entirety of the initial response before I start being a little more selective. If some of the bot’s responses still get a little tedious for you, just get the gist and then skip to the next question and answer.
I know chatbot responses are prone to error and there are concerns that some can spout misinformation. But the responses they give tend to prioritize facts and conclusions that are favored by the establishment. That’s how they’re designed and trained. So when you get a nice payoff at the end, having led it there step by step, it’s still a little startling to read.
(Note: the autopsy report was never entered into evidence at trial)
(This is where it gets really interesting)
(Then I start getting into questions that are run-on sentences, just to summarize before asking the bot to draw some conclusions.)
Thanks for sticking it through.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.