AI chatbot tools like ChatGPT are the new greeting cards, in a sense. A placid, prepackaged set of words meant to surmise complex emotions on behalf of someone who cannot or will not write up such words themselves.
Funeral homes and grieving families alike are turning to AI nowadays to write obituaries, the writing of which you think would be so personal that people would want to control that aspect of it themselves as one final exploration of their feelings toward a loved one.
“I just … emptied my soul into the prompt,” 55-year-old Jeff Fargo told the Washington Post in a feature about the rise of the AI-generated obituary. For someone who turns to ChatGPT to write an obituary for their mom, Jeff can turn a phrase.
The reason he did it, and the reason why funeral directors are now regularly asking the friends and relatives of the deceased whether they want an AI-written obituary, is to offload some of the pain and pressure of having to conjure the perfect words that sum up their feelings toward someone’s entire life.
Though one could argue that the pain and pressure are the whole point of it, a part of the grieving process that you are opting out of by offloading the work to AI, giving yourself the equivalent of a Hallmark card-style prepackaged set of platitudes that could apply to anyone.
The AI-Written Obituary Business Is Booming
AI startups are flooding the graveyard. Companies like CelebrateAlly and AI chatbots specifically designed to spit out obituaries, and Nemu, a maybe more helpful but still kind of ghoulish AI tool that helps the bereaved inventory the deceased’s stuff.
It all sounds helpful on the surface, but do any emotional exploration into it, and it feels like it’s removing the human element from something profoundly human. The outsourcing of one of the most emotional acts of writing to the same tech that generated your boss’s last email.
On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with results. Fargo’s ChatGPT-generated obituary so resonated with his family that he’s already prepping the AI for his dad’s inevitable death, even telling the Post that he’s going to use OpenAI’s “Deep Research Mode,” an AI agent that does all the research into a subject for you.
“It’s gonna be a banger,” Fargo said of something he’s only going to be peripherally a part of, and oh yeah, by the way, he’s talking about a theoretical obituary for his father in the same way a club DJ talks about an upcoming gig.
I can understand offloading menial, obnoxious tasks to AI. I can’t imagine feeling emotionally and psychologically fulfilled after outsourcing my emotions. They’re not my emotions. Yes, I prompted them into existence, but the syntax, the verbiage, the specificity of language that our memories seem to select on their own for reasons that feel mysterious, that’s what I feel like I would be losing.
When news of someone outsourcing the traditionally fundamental element of the grieving process passes through my ears, I interpret that as someone trying to run away from the pain rather than putting in the difficult work of confronting it.
I recently had to put down an old, sickly dog that meant the world to me. One of the ways I’ve been able to come to terms with her passing is by putting a literal pen to literal paper to write my emotions in a notebook physically. Writing is my profession, yet reading previous entries in my handwritten obituary journal, I find myself unable to turn off my editorial brain.
I’m catching errors all over the place and constantly spotting areas where I could’ve better expressed myself. Yet, I’m still satisfied with every word I laid out, every idea I tried to convey, because while the grieving process can be messy, a messiness that translates into the writing of an obituary, I am happy that I am including myself in the messiness. I am an active participant in the pain, the only real way to ever get through it.
I also understand and have, on numerous occasions, fallen victim to our convenience-obsessed age, where technology allows us to quickly remove ourselves from processes with ruthless efficiency in the name of productivity, bulldozing through the tough stuff with a few clicks.
The expediting of the grieving process is a natural, if callous, branch of that. Big tech booms attempt to disrupt every nook and cranny of our lives because there is money to be made in those nooks and crannies, especially in the parts big tech should never touch.
But they will. It is inevitable, like death itself.
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