Did ChatGPT "Help Kill"? Public Rhetoric, Misplaced Blame, and the Compression of Responsibility in AI Discourse

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 Preprint / not peer reviewed.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.