Close to the Edge

Overview

Through Graphika’s intelligence monitoring, we have increasingly observed members of online fringe communities that intersect with nihilistic violent extremism and that glorify violence or engage with extreme behavior embracing generative AI tools to create visual content that venerates perpetrators of mass violence (PMVs) or encourages further violent acts.

While these users leveraged various tools, we found that they heavily relied upon OpenAI’s Sora before the company announced it would shut it down. In particular, we’ve observed members of these communities create AI-generated lifelike videos of mass shooters and PMVs, including Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, and Robb Elementary School shooter Salvador Ramos, among others.

We and other extremism researchers have previously observed members of these communities utilizing generative AI video tools, including to create animated images of PMVs dancing alongside their “kill count.” However, these more recent AI-generated videos mark an evolution in the type of content these communities share to glorify PMVs. These videos enable members of these communities to reenact and celebrate violent acts, romanticize, humanize, or trivialize PMVs, and depict PMVs or other criminals as living life, engaging with children, or embracing white supremacist ideologies. In turn, this content normalizes violent acts and may encourage others to commit violence.

This report examines how these online communities use these tools, the content they create, and the means by which they circumvent moderation by social media and generative AI platforms. We focus specifically on two online subcultures:

• The Edgesphere, an international online subculture that spans niche forums, private chats, and mainstream social media platforms, and whose members engage in transgressive behavior cloaked in ironic humor.
• Violent subsets of the True Crime Community (TCC), which is characterized by its members’ “obsessive” glorification of PMVs, particularly school shooters. While most of this community is non-violent, it engages in the normalization of PMVs and contains subsets that identify with, excuse, and encourage violent acts.

This report covers research we conducted between November 2025 and April 2026, before OpenAI announced it would shutter Sora. While we found that Sora was an instrumental tool for these communities, we assess that Edgesphere and TCC members will migrate to other tools or platforms. We have already observed some starting to use other Western and Chinese AI tools, including Kling AI, PixVerse AI, Hailuo AI, or Google DeepMind's Veo 3, to generate similar content. Most of the content we observed during this investigation was posted on TikTok and X; however, we also found limited examples on Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and YouTube.