AI obituaries
The new trend in death care promises a "faster way to remember." What happens when the AI gets it wrong?
Full story: The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die
A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know.
Funeral directors are increasingly asking the relatives of the deceased whether they would prefer for AI to write the obituary, rather than take on the task themselves. Josh McQueen, the vice president of marketing and product for the funeral-home management software Passare, said its AI tool has written tens of thousands of obituaries nationwide in the last few years.
Tech start-ups are also working to build obituary generators that are available to everyone in their time of grief, for a small fee. Sonali George, the founder of one such tool called CelebrateAlly, said the AI functions as an “enabler for human connection” because it can help people skip past an overwhelming task and still end up with something that can bring their family together.
“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 said. “If you had the tool to do ‘25 reasons why I love you, mom,’” she added, “wouldn’t it still mean something, even if it was written by a machine?”
The AI tools’ speed has made them quite popular in the “death care” industry, where funeral staff have traditionally been required to pull together sensitive details about a person’s lineage and accomplishments before writing the documents themselves.
Skip Phelps, a sales executive at Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum in Cincinnati, said in a testimonial on Passare’s website that its AI obituary writer is “truly amazing,” with “great adjectives and descriptions.” And Ryan Lynch, the head of product at PlotBox, an Ireland-based developer of cemetery software, said the tools were the talk of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association conference in Las Vegas.
“Someone did stand up and say they thought it was the greatest advancement in funeral-home technology since some kind of embalming tool,” Lynch said. “Which I thought was maybe a bit hyperbolic.”
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