A Time Traveling Superintelligent AI tried to warn about correspondence dinner
A viral conspiracy theory on social media claims a 3D stock image and a single tweet from 2023 predicted the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting involving suspect Cole Allen. Believers argue the image, linked to a fake 'time machine' website, contains hidden messages from a future AI warning about the event. In reality, the image is a widely used 2021 stock photo titled 'Eternal Waterfall' with no connection to time travel or AI.
- ▪A Twitter account named 'Henry Martinez' posted only one tweet on December 21, 2023, saying 'Cole Allen,' the name of the suspected shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
- ▪Conspiracy theorists claim the account's header image is a coded message from a time-traveling AI warning of the shooting and the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
- ▪The image is actually a 2021 stock photo by 'Distinct Mind,' titled 'Eternal Waterfall,' used widely online for blogs, posters, and commercial purposes.
- ▪The 'Time Machine' reference comes from a European research group that used the image on a blog post but did not create it or claim time travel capabilities.
- ▪The stock image has been downloaded over 27,000 times and has appeared in contexts ranging from psychedelic therapy to financial blogs.
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Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/did-a-time-traveling-superintelligent-ai-try-to-warn-about-white-house-correspondents-dinner-shooting-an-investigation/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:13:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T13:24:31.953Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T13:24:31.953Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XbKvzrEZxjdh |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tweets containing an abstract, psychedelic 3D stock image have million and millions of views on X because it is supposedly the key to a superintelligent, time-traveling AI conspiracy that attempted to warn people about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I’m gonna try to explain the mind-numbing conspiracy theory that has taken over my timeline over the last few hours. A few hours after a gunman was taken into custody Saturday night, X users found an account called “Henry Martinez” that has posted exactly one tweet, on December 21, 2023. The tweet says “Cole Allen,” which is the name of the suspected shooter.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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