Rinderknecht got out of his car and hiked up the trail, past a sign stating “Danger” and “No Fires/Smoking,” toward a small clearing sometimes called the “Hidden Buddha” for a hollowed out stump where people placed Buddha figurines.
At 11:47 p.m., he took out his iPhone and captured a 360-degree video of the area. Seven minutes later he played the song “Un Zder, Un Thé” by the French rapper Josman, about despair and bitterness.
There, by himself, with the world stretched out below, Rinderknecht entered into the New Year.
Months before the fire, Rinderknecht had sent curious prompts to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence app, according to the affidavit.
In July, he asked ChatGPT to produce a “dystopian painting” with three distinct parts, the affidavit says.
“On the far left, there is a burning forest. Next to it, a crowd of people is running away from the fire,” he wrote. “In the middle, hundreds of thousands of people in poverty are trying to get past a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it. On the other side of the gate and the entire wall is a conglomerate of the richest people. They are chilling, watching the world burn down, and watching the people struggle.”
After several more failed attempts, his 911 call finally connected at 12:17 a.m. and he reported the presence of a fire, the affidavit states.
During that call, he went to his ChatGPT app and asked a question: “Are you at fault if a fire is lift [sic] because of your cigarettes,” according to the affidavit.
He made a screen-recording on his iPhone of several attempted 911 calls and his question to ChatGPT, the affidavit states. That action “indicates that Rinderknecht wanted to preserve evidence of himself trying to assist in the suppression of the fire and he wanted to create evidence regarding a more innocent explanation for the cause of the fire,” according to the affidavit.
How do they know all that? 
