AI Chatbots Draft Eulogies for the Deceased, Raising Questions About Grief and Authenticity
As funeral homes and families increasingly use AI chatbots to write obituaries, a new report highlights both the convenience and the emotional cost. The technology, praised for easing the burden of grief, also risks fabricating details and airbrushing the imperfections that make tributes meaningful.
The Washington Post reports that funeral homes and grieving families are increasingly turning to AI chatbots to compose obituaries, a trend that underscores the expanding role of automation in even the most intimate human rituals. The practice, which has gained traction over the past year, offers convenience but also raises concerns about authenticity and the emotional processing of loss.
At last year's National Funeral Directors Association conference in Las Vegas, AI was a dominant topic of discussion, according to Ryan Lynch, head of product at cemetery software developer PlotBox. Lynch recalled one attendee declaring it "the greatest advancement in funeral-home technology since some kind of embalming tool," a statement he described as "maybe a bit hyperbolic." The conference's Innovation Awards also reflected the trend, with the second-place prize going to Nemu, an AI-enabled app that catalogs and appraises a deceased person's belongings for family distribution.
Sonali George, founder of the AI obituary generator CelebrateAlley, sees the technology as an "enabler of human connection." She posed a rhetorical question to WaPo: "Imagine for the person who just died, [wouldn't] that person want their best friend to say a heartfelt tribute that makes everybody laugh, brings out the best, with AI?" She added, "If you had the tool to do '25 reasons why I love you, mom,' wouldn't it still mean something, even if it was written by a machine?"
The appeal is straightforward: writing an obituary while grieving is emotionally taxing, and AI offers a frictionless alternative. Jeff Fargo, a 55-year-old Nevada man, told WaPo that ChatGPT helped him memorialize his mother. "I just… emptied my soul into the prompt," he said. "I was mentally not in a place where I could give my mom what she deserved. And this did it for me." The AI-generated tribute was well received by those who knew his mother. Fargo now plans to use OpenAI's Deep Research mode for his father's obituary, calling it "a banger."
When AI Embellishes the Truth
WaPo's testing of CelebrateAlly, which uses models from OpenAI and Anthropic, revealed a common flaw: the AI invents details. When prompted to write an obituary for a fictional "Jimmy" described as thoughtful, the AI produced, "His thoughtful nature manifested in countless acts of kindness, each gesture reflecting his profound understanding of human nature…" Another prompt describing Jimmy as strong led to embellishments about his "legendary" strength and "inner fortitude," despite no mention of such traits in the original input.
Mary McGreevy, who runs a popular TikTok account dedicated to reading obituaries, argues that the raw imperfections in writing and in the person being described are what make an obituary beautiful. AI, she said, effectively "airbrushes" those imperfections. "The best obituaries aren't written by talented writers but by people 'who just lay it all out there… to get to the imperfect heart of who that person was,'" she told WaPo. "Those are the ones I think truly help people in their grief. And they're not necessarily professional or polished at all."
The mother of an AI obituary generator founder expressed a similar sentiment, as quoted by her son: she and her peers find it disheartening that "someone found a faster way to remember you and move on with their lives." This tension—between efficiency and the need to process grief—lies at the heart of the debate over AI's role in death care.
Comments 0