AI slop books about Charlie Kirk assassination ignite conspiracy theories online

"Amazon requires 72 hours to approve and publish a book. Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University on Sept 10th. Yet a book titled 'The Shooting of Charlie Kirk: A Comprehensive Account of the Utah Valley University Attack' was already LIVE on Amazon on Sept 9th," claims a September 11, 2025 post on X. 

"How the hell does a book about the Charlie Kirk shooting hit Amazon BEFORE the assassination even happened?" 

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A screenshot of a post on X taken on September 17, 2025

Posts about books on Amazon apparently pointing to a "psyop" or orchestrated events leading to Kirk's September 10 death from a shooting during a speech at Utah Valley University, reverberated across X and beyond -- boosted by InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

Similar conspiracy theories born from alleged quick publications of books covering political figures and major news events were previously debunked by AFP. They have become part of a growing quality control problem in the publishing industry and e-commerce, according to experts.

But officials believe the shooter in Utah acted alone.

Authorities officially charged 22-year-old Utah resident, Tyler Robinson, for the deadly shooting of Kirk, a polarizing figure in US politics who faced accusations of transphobia and racism throughout his career.

Text exchanges between Robinson and his roommate are being investigated to pin down a motive. Evidence shows Robinson planned the shooting for a little over a week and said he "hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age."

Amazon did briefly list titles about Kirk which appeared to predate the shooting, AFP confirmed, but they have since been removed. 

A spokesperson for the company pointed AFP to its content guidelines for listing books.

For those using Kindle Direct Publishing, the company says: "It takes 3 to 10 business days for your book or update to be Live on Amazon" (archived here). It does not require that the release date and the publication date be the same (archived here).

Amazon did not disclose if the books about the Kirk shooting violated its policies but its spokesperson said that the date of publication displayed for one of the titles was incorrect "due to a technical issue."

"We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. The title was published late in the afternoon on September 10," they said. 

British investigative journalist Nick Stapleton (archived here) told AFP that Amazon allows the release date for a book to be set prior to the date it was actually published.

"A clever scammer has AI-generated a nonsense text about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and then set it as being released before he was shot, creating a situation in which people who are inclined to believe his death was some kind of conspiracy will be more likely to buy this entirely worthless book," the co-host of the BBC daytime series Scam Interceptors (archived here) said on September 16.

Stapleton said AI-generated content easily slips through detection tools at Amazon (archived here). "The nature of an open platform like Amazon is such that it's easily abused by those with the desire to do so," he said. 

"No conspiracy here, just a bunch of creative AIthor scammers trying to find ways to maximise purchase of their crappy product."

'AI generated nonsense'

Jane Friedman, a writer covering the publishing industry (archived here), told AFP on September 15 that the listings were "clearly AI generated nonsense."

She said: "This happens every single time there's a major news event or when a public figure enters the news. Still, Amazon does little or nothing to stop it until the media coverage starts."

One of the removed book entries titled: "The Shooting of Charlie Kirk: A Comprehensive Account of the Utah Valley University Attack, the Aftermath, and America's Response" was temporarily listed as authored by "Anastasia J. Casey."

Through keyword searches on Google, Amazon as well as independent and online book merchants, AFP found no other entries matching the author's name prior to Kirk's shooting (archived here, here, here and here).

BBC's Stapleton advised caution by readers, saying one should consult product reviews from the same seller, look for discrepancies in font sizes and examine the frequency of a publisher's releases before making a purchase.

For example, a purported Kirk biography with a publication date of May 18, 2024 (archived here) shows signs of poorly-written, low-quality content. Listings by the same author yield reviews that hint at the use of artificial intelligence to generate text (archived here).

Additionally, the illustration on the book said to be authored by "Yahia Press" bears little resemblance to the late founder of Turning Point USA.

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A screenshot taken on September 17, 2025 of a likely AI-generated biography of Charlie Kirk listed on Amazon

Jon Gillham (archived here), CEO of Canadian AI-detection firm, Originality.ai, said that the very existence of these AI-slop books available on a major platform like Amazon point to a much deeper societal challenge: "AI-generated content can proliferate at extreme rates, completely overwhelming any mechanisms currently available for quality control and verification."

"This is just the beginning of a much larger information integrity problem," he said on September 15.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about Kirk's shooting here.