AI Obituaries Are Getting More Popular

How does one go about distilling the life of a deceased loved one into a short piece of text, one that can give a sense of their personality to friends and strangers alike? For a growing number of people, the solution to writing an obituary for a family member or close friend involves firing up AI, entering some general details, and waiting to see what text emerges.

In a recent article for The Washington Post, Drew Harwell examined the phenomenon of AI-penned obituaries — something that both surviving family members and funeral directors have found useful. And while there’s been a lot of discussion of whether or not using AI is right or ethical for some big life decisions, including writing wedding vows and speeches, it’s a little more understandable to see why someone grieving might not feel like they’re in the best frame of mind to memorialize a dead loved one.

The Post cites data from Josh McQueen of Passare, a software company that works with funeral homes, to the effect that the company’s AI has created “tens of thousands of obituaries” in the last few years.

That is not to say that some bristle at the idea of using this technology for this purpose. “I am hearing my friend’s voice in describing their loved ones,” Santa Clara University ethicist Irina Raicu told the Post. “That’s what gets lost: that sense of really seeing what they saw.”

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Much like a lot of things involving AI, the ethics of using it for obituaries will vary dramatically from person to person. Someone flattened by grief might find the ease of use of this technology helpful during a bad time; someone else might be appalled by the idea of anything other than a handcrafted obituary.

That’s also without getting into concerns over hallucinated data, which the Post notes is a concern. Software creating an obituary isn’t something that most people would have thought about a decade ago; now, it’s the stuff of news. We live in a stranger world than we’d expect.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…