Charlie Kirk engendered as much chaos in death as he did in life. After the pseudo-intellectual was assassinated this September, America erupted into a vitriolic debate over the value of Kirk’s short-lived career.
To conservatives, he became a martyr: President Donald Trump ordered the American flag to be flown at half-mast, Vice President JD Vance embraced Erika Kirk on live TV and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry challenged LSU to put a Charlie Kirk statue on campus.
As someone who found Kirk insufferable, I breathed a sigh of relief when the LSU Student Senate unanimously voted against the statue on Nov. 5. Surely, I thought, we could finally let the dead lie — and make Landry shut up for a while.
That was until I logged into my X account and saw Kirk’s face grafted onto ex-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Assad isn’t alone: “Kirkification” — the practice of using AI to superimpose Kirk’s face onto another person — has taken over the internet, primarily as a means of poking fun at the dead man’s supporters.
To be clear, I’m not up in arms about “Kirkification.” I think Charlie Kirk was a bad person, so I’m not the least bit bothered by Gen Z trolling him online.
There is, however, a morbid dimension to “Kirkification” that raises important questions about how AI impacts digital grief.
Of course, most of our dead loved ones didn’t make careers off of rage-baiting progressive 20-somethings, so I suspect that my parents won’t be “Heatherified” and “Ryanified” when they kick the bucket.
But the prospect of recreating the likenesses of dead friends and family — for malicious purposes or not — demands that we re-evaluate the rapidly evolving landscape of digital grief.
That bereavement has gone virtual is not new. Far removed from the traditional wake-funeral-burial-mourn-move on ritual of yore, modern-day grieving is inextricably tied to digital space. We post obituaries online, share memories of lost loved ones on social media and seek solace in web-based support groups.
Already, psychologists have warned that, taken to an extreme, going online may harm bereaved people’s mental health through a process they’ve dubbed “grief looping.” They posit that the internet creates a peculiar kind of digital immortality by causing the bereaved to relive their experience of loss every time their dead loved ones pop up on their social media feeds.
AI takes grief looping to another level.
Imagine how harmful it might be for parents to grieve their dead children by using ChatGPT to recreate their voices — to hear them one last time. Processing loss becomes impossible when one is constantly reminded of it.
Of course, I would be remiss to write about “Kirkification” without mentioning the political utility of AI-induced immortality.
While the left has used Kirk’s death as an opportunity to meme him, Evangelical megachurches have begun playing AI-generated voice clips of Kirk, asking the clergy to “get up and join the fight.”
Similarly, this August, parents of Parkland shooting victim Joaquin Oliver used AI to recreate their son’s voice, using it as a medium to galvanize support for gun control.
In both instances, the wielders of AI pursued causes to which their subject likely would have been amenable. Kirk loved rallying Evangelicals against the left, and one would assume that a victim of preventable gun violence would support gun control.
Still, there’s something uncomfortable about reviving the dead for political ends, paradoxically weaponizing the voices of people who literally cannot speak for themselves.
It’s hard to advocate for government regulation of AI because, frankly, we’ve already opened Pandora’s box: deepfakes are everywhere — even in the graveyard.
But I will conclude with a warning: the next time you lose a loved one, consider logging off. Your sanity may depend on it.
Cade Savoy is a 21-year-old political science and philosophy major from Breaux Bridge, La.
