AI-written obituaries embody human grief
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“Where do I start?” said Bridget Todd, creator and host of the podcast No Girls Online. “It was a real monkey. I feel like I'm still processing everything.”
In early July, Todd lost his mother Carolyn Todd, a prominent physician in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Carolyn's death occurred just days after Todd's father was rushed to the ICU after a fall at home. “We all came together in Richmond to take care of my dad, so, understandably, the family energy was around him,” Todd said. A few hours later, my mother suddenly dies.”
What followed were some of the hardest days of Todd's life. But his misery was compounded by something that could have been completely avoided: A mistake-filled error, possibly made by AI, written without the family's knowledge, began to attract attention on social media.
For a woman with a story as powerful as Carolyn's—born in rural Virginia, raised as an orphan before rising to the medical ranks—the obituary fell flat. “The obituary didn't say anything specific,” Todd said. “It was like: 'He was a doctor, and the pediatric patients loved him.'”
It was riddled with errors, Todd said, and appeared on a website full of cheap ads called Obitsupdate. “It was incredibly difficult to make all these preparations,” Todd said. “And on top of that, we don't need an AI website of unsanctioned bullshit that makes everything difficult for us.”
Todd is not alone in his frustration. AI-generated obits now fill the web on sites like BNN, Thaiger, and FreshersLive, marking a new chapter in the quest to monetize misery. Many of these sites that churn out AI-generated content, exploit the dead, are based in Asia and appear to be operating solely to generate ad revenue. BNN was spun off from Hong Kong by an Indian-American businessman before shutting down its media arm in May 2024; FreshersLive has reportedly ended in Southeast Asia; and Thaiger is a Thai-based news website featuring local news and 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 such as Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria to put existing stories, including obituaries, through artificial intelligence tools before posting on its website, Times called a “food store.” It is 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 cut profits. That would be uneconomical at a time when people have to write stories. Augmented with productive AI tools, it is possible. But AI-generated publishers don't know what impact it has on the rest of the population. In early March, Chris Mohney's father, Paul, died in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Paul served in the US Army during the Korean War and worked as a systems engineering manager at IBM for nearly four decades. He died in the hospital. “He wasn't critical and in fact he seemed to be recovering, but he had been weak for a long time, so it was still shocking or not really a surprise,” said Mohney. Mohney and her three siblings wrote a brief obituary, which funeral directors shared with local papers in the family's various towns.
But, less than two days after delivering the obituary, Mohney searched for his father's name on Google, and found not the piece he had written, but something completely different. Among the top results were several versions of the obituary the family had written, but it was sent to BNN, and greatly expanded. These ballooned versions featured “hyper-inflated purple prose, big headlines in every section, and tons of obnoxious ads,” Mohney said.
Those changes introduced errors, including a claim that he was awarded certain medals while serving during the Korean War. “My father was a good person but he didn't see the war, in fact the war ended right after he finished training, so he didn't get medals,” said Mohney.
The rise of these fake obits shows not only the dangers of AI, but also our SEO-centric internet culture. “There's a whole new strategy in search rankings,” said SEO expert Chris Silver Smith, “and I believe it's based on getting this information that someone has died, and seeing that there's a slight increase in traffic, maybe [a specific region]on behalf of that person, and to quickly optimize and publish articles about the person so that they can find these search songs.”
Silver Smith knows firsthand how painful those topics can be: After her brother-in-law was killed in a car accident last year in Dallas, Texas, the family was quickly bombarded with AI-generated reports about his death. “What I quickly determined was that these websites that were coming up were spam websites,” Silver Smith said. One of the most prominent articles in the search results appeared on a Nigerian website.
For Todd, it's an ominous sign of where things could be headed in an AI-powered world. He says: “I don't think people are seen as human beings in the same way anymore.” “I think our pain and our experiences are seen as more fodder for engagement.”
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