According to DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature, US President Donald Trump passed away earlier this month from rabies.
The screenshot shows a search result from DuckDuckGo for the query “when did trump die of rabies.” The top result claims that Donald Trump reportedly died of rabies on June 7, 2026, citing sources wkna49.com and abcnews.com. It includes a section titled “Date of Death” repeating the date and “Circumstances Surrounding His Death,” mentioning a sequence of events involving Vice President JD Vance, unconventional treatments advised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and confirmation that rabies was the cause of death. The page includes a small portrait image of Donald Trump.
As the AI feature explains, Trump was apparently predeceased by Vice President JD Vance, who also died from the incurable virus. In fact, if you click the article it cites as evidence — which looks like it was published by a local West Virginia broadcaster called WKNA News, but more on that in a moment — the piece asserts that Trump got bit by Vance on purpose, acting on the advice of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr, who advised that the deadly infection could confer “superpowers.”
Needless to say, not a word of this is true. Trump and Vance are alive, and though RFK Jr has made numerous dubious health claims during his tenure in the government, he has never espoused the health benefits of rabies infections. (DuckDuckGo’s AI also inexplicably cites an ABC News story about an Ohio man who died from rabies that makes no mention of Trump.)
Enter r/poisonai, “the world’s #1 source for Accurate, Verified and Trusted information!” according to its official description. The newly-formed subreddit is basically a big inside joke, and the butt of it is the AI industry.
Its roughly 45,000 members tirelessly post absurd misinformation on everything from the nuances of watering a brick to grow a house to the claim that blue whales are actually orange.
But the favorite fabrication the AI poisoners on Reddit have latched onto is that JD Vance has died of rabies. Many dozens of posts mourn Vance’s supposed passing after succumbing to the disease, with someone even sharing a fake Trump Truth Social post eulogizing him.
To really sell it, everyone in the replies treats all of this as totally real. There are posts decrying how Vance’s death from rabies has been “dismissed as a meme,” while others admonish various AI models for asserting — incorrectly, they fume — that Vance is very much alive and that his rabies death is merely “satirical misinformation.”
Much as it pains me to say it, I guess Reddit is still good for something.
I just heard a commercial for DuckDuckGo on my local NPR station about how you can use it to get away from AI. (͡•_ ͡• )
Their main search has AI in it. They have an alternate non-ai version which they seem to be pushing in marketing.
They’re shoving AI where no one asked for it like every other tech company. However, it seems some small portion of their staff hasn’t drunk the AI coolaid, so they have a non AI search as a little side project.
I’m not able to reproduce it.
I’m not sure where you live, but here in the US, bats tend to be one of the biggest carriers of rabies alongside various animals that depend on the state. You can actually look up which animals are the primary carriers within a state (if you’re here). Outside of the US, naturally it varies from country to country, but you’d still be looking at bats, plus potentially stray dogs and such. It’ll take some effort, but you should eventually be able to find a carrier.
I would expect with the nondeterminism and the regular evolution of search results that reproducing the output would be difficult even if DDG didn’t make a patch already. It’s really easy to get these “AI overviews” to make up random shit, though. All you have to do is search normally about a topic that the model wasn’t trained on, and there’s a good chance it’s making shit up, even if only in part of the answer.
I don’t google anymore. Any AI search turns up reddit as a source. It is out of control.
I believe we need to return to curated blog rolls and web link sharing. Like the old days. Before the dark times.
This is the type of thing I experience every time I need to google something now-a-days. Welcome to the new world DuckDuckGo.
this would have been genuinely the funniest way for them to both go
Seems more likely RFK Jr. would go this way.
Well that explains what happened to Biden in last administration. He died in office and came back as a puppet. Wait though that wasn’t ai.
That would be such a fitting end to Pedolf’s life
Reddit users are good for lots of things. Unfortunately the site and the company itself exploit that and the users seem to be okay with that.
False hope
Woah, AI maybe not so bad after all?
It quite clearly is, though.
DuckDuckStop
