Stephen King Has Not Been Banned From Twitter, Contrary To Viral, AI-penned Hoax

A viral story suggesting horror author Stephen King has been banned from Twitter / X for calling the platform's owner Elon Musk "The First Lady" of the upcoming Trump administration is a hoax.

The hoax came from "entertainment.bbuzz" on Threads before making its way across the rest of social media in recent days as it garnered attention online.

It was debunked by PolitiFact late last week, though anyone could debunk the story simply by looking at King's still-active X account.

Perhaps more interesting than the short-lived hoax is how it came to be. The "article" that was the hoax's source was posted to a site named Xyno.Online and was written by an "author" named "T1910."

Mr. or Mrs. T1910 wrote 20 news articles on November 2nd, 2024, and, in general, writes almost entirely about Angel Reese, Priyanka Chopra, Blake Lively and Ciara. This is almost certainly the work of AI.

It's fairly obvious in the King-Musk article that a generative AI writing tool was used to try and write an informal satire based on the idea that Elon Musk had banned Stephen King. It has several bizarre turns of phrases and can't seem to decide if it wants to make fun of King or Musk.

For example, it says Stephen King literally "fought" Pennywise the Clown, the villain from the King horror epic It, and that Musk was "cozying up to Democrats" after he'd spent the entire past month campaigning with Donald Trump.

Furthermore, much of the article is made of JPEGs of text rather than actual text.

It seems the hoax is merely some AI-generated slop that escaped containment and became a small story. However, this whole ordeal provides an answer to the question, "Can AI be funny?" And that answer, at least in this instance, appears to be "no."