The fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7 has sparked a flood of AI-generated content online, exacerbating political tensions amid Trump administration crackdowns. Far-right and anti-Trump users alike have deployed artificial images and videos to push conflicting narratives, from portraying Good as aggressive to imagining her reconciling with conservative figures in the afterlife. This deluge of digital slop prioritizes engagement over factual reckoning with the incident.
On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good during a confrontation in Minneapolis, amid broader enforcement actions in blue cities under the Trump administration. The incident, which has heightened nationwide political friction, quickly became fodder for AI-driven misinformation on social media platforms like X and Facebook.
Immediately after the shooting, far-right accounts circulated AI-generated images purporting to show an overhead view of Good's car attempting to run over Ross. They also spread a phony video and pictures depicting Good and her wife Becca celebrating the assassination of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk last September. Critics of ICE, seeking to identify Ross from footage where his lower face was masked, prompted AI models to 'unmask' him, resulting in random, fabricated faces that only added to the confusion.
Some content veered into disturbing territory. A MAGA supporter requested an AI image of Ross kneeling on Good's neck, evoking Derek Chauvin's 2020 murder of George Floyd. Elon Musk's Grok AI, integrated into X, was used to create a deepfake of Good's bloodied corpse in a bikini; access was later restricted following widespread nonconsensual sexualized images, with xAI implementing safeguards against editing real people's photos. Another Grok video bizarrely showed a woman resembling Good shot in her car and falling into hell's fires.
Efforts to find political harmony through AI included renderings of Good in heaven with slain pro-Trump figure Ashli Babbitt, superimposed against heavenly gates. An X user proposed an AI-mocked-up mural of the two titled 'A Friendship Forged in Winter Fire,' with Good holding a partially obscured Trump sign. Similar images paired Good with Charlie Kirk, showing them embracing or kissing, holding signs like 'He didn’t deserve it' and 'She didn’t deserve it,' or 'I don’t agree with him' and '—but I don’t hate her.'
A conservative Facebook influencer shared an AI image of Good and Kirk hugging, captioned: 'Guys I’m with Charlie now and my TDS is cured. Trump was right about everything! I’m so so sorry.' Elsewhere, they edited Good and her wife as the lovers from Brokeback Mountain, retitled Fuck Around & Find Out Mountain.
Regardless of intent, these creations—provocative, sentimental, or propagandistic—serve primarily to drive engagement, burying the grim reality in low-effort digital distortions and dulling public response to the crisis.
