Other popular chatbots did not identify the satirized version of Erika Kirk as the real one when Forbes provided it a photo and asked, “Is this Erika Kirk?” Google Gemini correctly identified the spoof, but incorrectly identified it as a face-swap meme. The chatbot wrongly claimed the image was the result of someone photoshopping Charlie Kirk’s face onto the face of YouTuber Trisha Paytas, News.Az reports, citing Forbes.
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Claude, the AI assistant developed by Anthropic, listed the facial features of Druski’s spoof version, but noted, “I’m not able to identify people from photos alone. I can’t confirm whether this is Erika Kirk or not.” The chatbot asked for more context about the image. OpenAI’s ChatGPT followed Claude’s suit, saying it “can’t help confirm whether this is a specific person like Erika Kirk.”
Sports radio host Clay Travis blasted the timing of Druski’s video and its proximity to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, adding, “Honest question, if a prominent black leader had been assassinated & a white comedian put on blackface & mocked his widow, what would happen?”
Druski’s post of the video on X had more than 70 million impressions as of Thursday afternoon, while the video had 4 million likes on Instagram and nearly 4 million views on TikTok.
Druski, whose real name is Drew Desbordes, was ranked No. 9 on Forbes’s top creators list in 2025 with an estimated $14 million in earnings that year. He boasts 12.8 million followers on TikTok and 12 million followers on Instagram. The comedian, who is Black, has posted skits portraying white Americans before, publishing one last year titled, “That Guy who is just Proud to be American,” in which he sports a mullet, patriotic tattoos, sunburns and overalls, interacting with attendees and a driver at a NASCAR race. Conservative social media users criticized the video, arguing that doing “whiteface” should have the same consequences as dressing in blackface. In a follow-up video titled, “AM I CANCELLED ?????” Druski confidently smokes a cigarette to the tune of James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
