AI-written obituaries are compounding people’s grief

“Where do I even start?” says Bridget Todd, the creator and host of the podcast There are No Girls on the Internet. “It’s just been a real motherfucker. I feel like I’m still processing it all.”

In early July, Todd lost her mother Carolyn Todd, a renowned physician in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Carolyn’s death came just days after Todd’s father was rushed to the ICU after taking a fall at home. “We were all congregating in Richmond around the care of my dad and so, understandably, the family energy was around him,” Todd says. “Then a few hours later, my mother passes away completely unexpectedly.”

What followed were some of the hardest days of Todd’s life. But her grief was compounded by something totally avoidable: An error-strewn, likely AI-generated obituary, written without the family’s knowledge, started careening around social media.

For a woman with a story as powerful as Carolyn’s—born in rural Virginia, she grew up an orphan before working her way up the medical ranks—the obituary fell woefully flat. “This obituary didn’t say anything specific at all,” says Todd. “It was just like: ‘She was a doctor, and pediatric patients loved her.’”

It was also full of errors, Todd says, and appeared on a website that was cluttered with cheap ads called Obitsupdate.  “It was incredibly difficult to make all of these arrangements,” says Todd. “And on top of that, we don’t need an unauthorized bullshit AI website making everything harder for us.”

Todd is far from alone in her frustration. AI-generated obits are now filling the web on sites like BNN, The Thaiger, and FreshersLive, marking a new chapter in the quest to monetize grief. Many of these sites churning out AI-generated content, exploiting the dead, are based in Asia and appear to be run solely to generate ad revenue. BNN was operated out of Hong Kong by an Indian-American entrepreneur before it shut its news arm in May 2024; FreshersLive is reportedly run out of Southeast Asia; and The Thaiger is a Thai-based news website that intersperses local news with obituaries about people with no connection to the country. The New York Times reported that BNN, before its closure, hired would-be journalists from countries like Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria to put existing stories, including obituaries, through generative AI tools before posting on its own website, which the Times called a “chop shop.” It’s one of more than 500 unreliable AI-generated websites identified by NewsGuard in October 2023.

The business model is simple: Produce automated content at scale to jump on Google trends and slough off profit. That would have been uneconomical in an era where people had to write the stories. Augmented by generative AI tools, it’s possible. But little do those who publish the AI-generated dross know what impact it has on the people left behind. In early March, Chris Mohney’s father, Paul, passed away in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Paul served in the U.S Army during the Korean War and worked as a systems engineering manager at IBM for nearly four decades. He died while in hospital. “He wasn’t critical and in fact seemed to be recovering, but he’d been infirm for a long time, so it was still a shock if not exactly a surprise,” says Mohney. Mohney and his three siblings wrote a concise obituary, which the funeral home shared with local papers in various family members’ hometowns.

But, not even two days after submitting the obituary, Mohney searched his father’s name on Google, he found not the piece he’d written, but something entirely different. Among the top results were a number of versions of the obituary the family had written, but posted to BNN, and heavily expanded. These ballooned versions featured “hyper-inflated purple prose, big headings every paragraph, and lots and lots of obnoxious ads,” Mohney says

Those changes introduced errors, including the claim he’d been awarded certain accolades for his time serving during the Korean War. “Dad was a great guy but he never saw any combat, in fact the war ended not long after he finished training, so he wasn’t winning any medals,” says Mohney. 

The growth of these bogus obits points not just to the dangers of AI, but also our SEO-obsessed internet culture. “There’s a whole new strategy in search rankings,” says SEO expert Chris Silver Smith, “and I believe it’s based off of getting this information that someone has died, and seeing that there’s a little spike in traffic, perhaps in [a specific region], for that person’s name, and rapidly optimizing and publishing articles about the person to get these dribbles of search traffic.”

Silver Smith knows firsthand just how hurtful those articles can be: After his brother-in-law was killed in a car crash last year in Dallas, Texas, the family was soon besieged by AI-generated reports about his death. “What I determined real quickly was that these websites that were showing up were spam websites,” says Silver Smith. One of the most prominent articles in the search results came on a Nigerian website.

For Todd, it’s a frightening sign of where things could be headed in an AI-fueled world. “I don’t think that people are really seen as people in the same way anymore,” she says. “I think that our pain and our experiences are just seen as more fodder for engagement.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91162990/ai-written-obituaries-are-compounding-peoples-grief?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss