The funeral director said "AI" as if it were a normal element of memorial services, like caskets or flowers. Of all places, I had not expected artificial intelligence to follow me into the small, windowless room of the mortuary. But here it was, ready to assist me in the task of making sense of death.
It was already Wednesday, and I'd just learned that I had to write an obituary for my mother by Thursday afternoon if I wanted it to run in Sunday's paper. AI could help me do this. The software would compose the notice for me.
As a professional writer, my first thought was that this would be unnecessary, at best. At worst, it would be an outrage. The philosopher Martin Heidegger held that someone's death is a thing that is truly their own. Now I should ask a computer to announce my mother's, by way of a statistical model?
"Did you say AI?" I asked the funeral director, thinking I must have been dissociating. But yes, she did. As we talked some more, my skepticism faded. The obituary is a specialized form. When a person of note dies, many newspapers will run a piece that was commissioned and produced years in advance: a profile of the deceased. But when a normal person dies -- and this applies to most of us -- the obituary is something else: not a standard piece of journalistic writing, but a formal notice, composed in brief, that also serves to celebrate the person's life. I had no experience in producing anything like the latter. The option to use AI was welcome news.
After all, there were lots of other things to do. The obituary was one of dozens of details I would have to address on short notice. A family in grief must choose a disposition method for their loved one, and perhaps arrange a viewing. They must plan for services, choose floral arrangements or other accessories, select proper clothing for the deceased, and process a large amount of paperwork. Amid these and other tasks, I found that I was grateful for the possibility of any help at all, even from a computer that cannot know a mother's love or mourn her passing.
The funeral director told me I would be given access to this AI tool in the funeral-planning online account that she had already created for me. I still had a few misgivings. Would I be sullying Mom's memory by doing this? I glanced over at an advertisement for another high-tech service -- one that could make lab-grown diamonds from my mother's ashes or her hair. Having an AI write her obituary seemed pretty tame in comparison. "Show me how to do it," I said.
Actually getting a computer to do the work proved unexpectedly difficult. Over the next 24 hours, the funeral director and I exchanged the kind of emails you might swap with office tech support while trying to connect to the shared printer. I was able to log in to the funeral portal (the funeral portal!) and click into the obituary section, but no AI option appeared. The funeral director sent over a screenshot of her display. "It may look slightly different on your end," she wrote. I sent a screenshot back: "That interface is not visible to me." Web-browser compatibility was discussed, then dismissed. The back-and-forth made me realize that Mom's memorial would be no more sullied by AI than it was by the very fact of using this software -- a kind of Workday app for death and burial.
In the end, the software failed us. My funeral director couldn't figure out how to give me access to the AI obituary writer, so I had to write one myself, using my brain and fingertips. I did what AI is best at: copying a formula. I opened up my dad's obituary, which Mom had written a couple of years earlier, and mirrored its format and structure. Dates and locations of birth and death, surviving family, professional life, interests. I was the computer now, entering data into a pre-provided template.
Read: A secret history of the obituary page
When I finally did get the chance to try the AI obituary writer a few weeks later -- after reaching out to Passare, the company behind it -- I found its output more creative than mine, and somehow more personal. Like everything else, the funeral-services industry is now operated by cloud-based software-as-a-service companies. Passare is among them, and offers back-office software for funeral-home management along with family-facing funeral-planning tools.
Josh McQueen, the company's vice president of marketing and product, explained why my earlier attempt to use the obituary-writing tool had failed: The funeral home must have had that feature set for staff-only access, which some businesses prefer. Then he gave me access to a mock funeral for the fictional departed John Smith so I could finally give it a go.
I couldn't change John Smith's name, but I pretended I was writing the obituary for my mother instead. Using simple web forms, I put in her education and employment information, some life events that corresponded to her "passions" and "achievements," and a few facts about relevant family members who had survived her or preceded her in death. These had to be entered one by one, choosing the type of relation from a drop-down and then checking a box to indicate whether the person in question was deceased. I felt like I was cataloging livestock.
From there, Passare's software, which is built on top of ChatGPT technology, generated an obituary. And you know what -- it was pretty good. Most of all, it was done, and with minimal effort from me. Here's an excerpt, with John Smith's name and pronouns swapped out for my mother's, and a couple of other very small alterations to smooth out the language:
The AI obituary can also be tuned by length and tone -- formal, casual, poetic, celebratory. (The poetic version added flourishes such as "she found joy in the gentle keys of her piano, filling her home with music that echoed her spirit.") Because an obituary is already a schematic form of writing, the AI's results were not just satisfactory but excellent, even. And, of course, once the draft was done, I could adjust it as I wished.
"When we first started testing this, ChatGPT would just make up stories," McQueen told me. It might assert that someone named Billy was often called Skippy, for example, and then concoct an anecdote to explain the fake nickname. This tendency of large language models, sometimes called hallucination, is caused by the technology's complex statistical underpinnings. But Passare found this problem relatively easy to tame by adjusting the prompts it fed to ChatGPT behind the scenes. He said he hasn't heard complaints about the service from any families who have used it.
Obituaries do seem well suited for an AI's help. They're short and easy to review for accuracy. They're supposed to convey real human emotion and character, but in a format that is buttoned-up and professional, for a public audience rather than a private one. Like cover letters or wedding toasts, they represent an important and uncommon form of writing that in many cases must be done by someone who isn't used to writing, yet who will care enough to polish up the finished product. An AI tool can make that effort easier and better.
And for me, at least, the tool's inhumanity was also, in its way, a boon. My experience with the elder-care and death industries -- assisted living, hospice, funeral homes -- had already done a fair amount to alienate me from the token empathy of human beings. As Mom declined and I navigated her care and then her death, industry professionals were always offering me emotional support. They shared kind words in quiet rooms that sometimes had flowers on a table and refreshments. They truly wanted to help, but they were strangers, and I didn't need their intimacy. I was only seeking guidance on logistics: How does all this work? What am I supposed to do? What choices must I make?
A person should not pretend to be a friend, and a computer should not pretend to be a person. In the narrow context of my mom's obituary, the AI provided me with middle ground. It neither feigned connection nor replaced my human agency. It only helped -- and it did so at a time when a little help was all I really wanted.
