The alleged arsonist responsible for the January 2025 Palisades fire asked the AI program ChatGPT to create an image of a burning city and said he burned a Bible, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors announced that 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht has been charged with one count of “Destruction of Property by Means of Fire” on Wednesday. Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California said during a press conference that a wealth of “digital evidence” pointed to Rinderknecht, including several images generated showing a city on fire and text prompts suggesting he had burned a copy of the Bible.
“The allegations in the affidavit supported by digital evidence, including the defendant’s ChatGPT prompt of a dystopian painting showing, in part, a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it and we’re going to put that up on the screen here once we get that going,” Essayli said. “The allegations – they are it is – that is from his ChatGPT, that’s an image he produced a few months before the fire started that shows the city being burnt there.”
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“The allegations are further supported by the defendant’s cell phone, his false statements to law enforcement and his behavior during the Lachman fire, which the defendant is charged with maliciously starting shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day of this year and which eventually became the Palisades fire,” Essayli continued.
Rinderknecht allegedly requested the images in July 2024, according to the indictment, roughly six months before the area around Los Angeles was hit with multiple wildfires that rapidly spread through Pasadena and other localities, destroying hundreds of buildings and leaving at least 24 people dead. According to the indictment, the Palisades fire was a “holdover fire” stemming from the Lachman fire that Rinderknecht allegedly set.
“Investigators determined that during the Lachman Fire a firebrand became seated within the dense vegetation and continued to smolder and burn within the root structure of the vegetation,” the indictment reads. “This underground burning was not visible to firefighters in the aftermath of the Lachman Fire and was not visible to members of the public who visited the hillside after the Lachman Fire. The strong sustained winds and even stronger wind gusts in the area on the morning of January 7, 2025, created conditions in which the holdover fire from the Lachman Fire ignited additional fuels and spread, becoming the Palisades Fire.”
The indictment described Rinderknecht’s ChatGPT prompts in the months before the fire, including one in which he described burning the Bible.
“I am 28 years old. And… I basically… This just happened. Maybe like… I don’t know, maybe like 3 months ago or something. Like, the realization of all this. I literally burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amazing. I felt so liberated,” Rinderknecht wrote.
After he allegedly set the Lachman fire, Rinderknecht allegedly asked if he would be responsible for a fire because of a cigarette.
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