My sister had only been gone for a few hours and the AI afterlife had already devoured her.
Jamie went into the hospital with stomach pain on a Friday last January. By Tuesday morning, she had passed away from an aggressive lymphoma at 36. Later that afternoon, my mom got a text about a suspicious obituary my aunt saw online.
The errors jumped out immediately. Her cause of death was listed as autism. The obituary chronicled a funeral that hadn't happened yet. The loss was described as saddening "the entire music community."
In other ways, it was eerily accurate. Jamie did have an optimistic spirit and a dedication to helping others. She was a "particular person," whatever that meant. It alluded constantly to health issues, which the obituary "writer" seemed to think had something to do with autism. Jamie had a stroke when she was 15, which left her with a limp and a speech impediment. Is that what it meant?
It was like looking at Jamie through a funhouse mirror — these core facts about her were so intimate, but they'd been stretched and distorted beyond recognition.
"I was furious," my mom said when I asked her what she remembered about that initial discovery. "We wanted to tell her story. And before we even had a chance to do anything, it's already out there."
This was my introduction to a process that repeats itself every time someone dies and loved ones post about them on social media — primarily Facebook. Comments are harvested as raw materials for obituaries written by AI, and dozens of bots share links to them back on Facebook.
But it didn't stop there. We Googled Jamie's name to see if anything else was out there, found a handful of similar AI obit pages, as well as several YouTube videos reading fake obituaries with an AI voiceover while a still image of a car accident or a candle loomed ominously. They've since been taken down, but I'll never forget clicking seemingly endless links to AI memorials of Jamie.
Someone dies roughly every 10 seconds in America. In 2024, 1.9 million were cremated, 1 million were buried and 156,000 were donated to science, entombed or removed by the state, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. One survey from the obituary site Beyond the Dash found that 65% of the country wants to have an obituary written about them when they pass.
What the survey didn't say was who they'd like it to be written by. In today's world, it's become commonplace for AI to do the writing. Since ChatGPT burst on the scene in late 2022, people have increasingly been using generative AI to write emails, craft school essays and summarize complex documents. Google makes its Gemini AI tool almost inescapable in Gmail and Google Docs. At this point, 500 million people use ChatGPT alone every week, and 27% of US adults now say they interact with artificial intelligence "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey.
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