Conceptual working paper on responsibility attribution in contemporary AI discourse. This paper examines how public discourse compresses causal involvement, moral agency, operational responsibility, and institutional failure into person-like blame directed at large language models. Using reactions to the 2026 Tumbler Ridge shooting and subsequent litigation involving OpenAI as a case study, it distinguishes among factual reporting, legal allegation, and rhetorical amplification. Preprint / not peer reviewed. Working draft, March 2026.
Hinano Kimura (Fri,) studied this question.