Families and funeral directors are using AI obituary generators to more efficiently memorialize the dead. What happens when they get it wrong?
Two days after Jeff Fargo's mother died, he lay in bed, crying, at home in Nevada and opened his laptop to ChatGPT.
Her friends had asked about an obituary, so for nearly an hour he typed about her life: that she had been a single mom in a male-dominated world, that she never got the credit she was owed, that she was loved.
After a few seconds, the chatbot offered its condolences and a short passage memorializing her as an avid golfer known for her "kindness and love of dogs." After it was published in her community's newspaper, her friends said it captured her beautifully.
"I just ... emptied my soul into the prompt," said Fargo, 55. "I was mentally not in a place where I could give my mom what she deserved. And this did it for me."
Artificial intelligence tools are not just reshaping how we work, learn and live. They're also changing what happens after we die, as families and funeral homes seek help in creating tributes and eulogies to define a loved one's life.
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."
<mark class="hl_yellow"><b>What AI obituaries look like</b></mark>
The Post used the AI-writing tool <a href="https://www.celebrateally.com/legacy/obituary#form-template-formarea" target=_blank>CelebrateAlly</a> to create four sample obituaries about a fictional man named Jimmy. Those passages, excerpted below, include the prompts entered to get the specific results, as well as notes on where the AI tool seemed to exaggerate or make things up.
Outside the funeral business, however, obituary generators disturb people who see them as heartless shortcuts for reducing a person's life to automated text. They have also inflamed broader anxieties about how AI could coarsen the way people relate to and remember one another, turning basic elements of human existence, like grief, into just another task to optimize.
Irina Raicu, who directs the internet ethics program at Santa Clara University, said she worries about the "flattening effect" that could stem from people outsourcing their most emotional moments to unfeeling machines. A "generic simulacrum" of a memorial can't capture the full color of a person's relationships and experiences, she said, or offer the kind of real sorrow that can lead to closure for the people they left behind.
In a traditional obituary, "you can actually see the person through the writer's eyes, and that's what makes it so powerful," she said. "I am hearing my friend's voice in describing their loved ones. That's what gets lost: that sense of really seeing what they saw."
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'Passed away peacefully'
To McQueen, the funeral software executive, the technology's value is obvious. For a human, the task of elegantly summing up a loved one's life -- while also navigating the sadness and logistics of their death -- can be stressful and emotionally draining. For a large language model, it's all just text.
"You're given this assignment to write 500 words, and you want to be loving and profound, but you're dealing with this grief, so you sit at your computer and you're paralyzed," he said. "If this can help get some of your thoughts and ideas down on paper ... that to me is a win."
Thousands of funeral homes now use the company's software, he said, and many of them let families access the AI tool through their online funeral portals. Beyond clearing writer's block, he said, the AI is unmatched in being able to quickly adjust an obituary's length or tone.
"Do you want it to be more celebratory? Traditional? Poetic? Humorous?" McQueen said. "It provides just a new flavor on it, if you will."
Streamlining the tribute-making process has been a boon for funeral home professionals, whom families often entrust to do the work themselves, said Walker Posey, a fourth-generation funeral director and embalmer in South Carolina who works as the National Funeral Directors Association's spokesman.
Funeral directors, he said, are eager to make their businesses more efficient and often strained for time: Each family visit can require up to three hours of meetings and another three hours on the back end, managing paperwork. Many software programs the industry uses for case management, such as Afterword and Tribute, aim to help by offering AI obituary writers as a core feature.
"When you have, from a business standpoint, a high flow of families," Posey said, you want to see as many as possible while still "staying keen to the importance of human connection."
But the shift has created some division in the industry, with some old-timers unnerved by the coldness of it all -- or by the thought it might help take their jobs away. Posey, for his part, has been reluctant to use AI to write full obituaries, though he has copied a phrase or two. "Remember, this is an industry that has for a long time been in the same place," he said.
The Tribute tool on a funeral home's website in Florida lets a family member choose the obituary's tone and "creativity level" as well as three words to describe their loved one, such as "selfless" or "wise." There's also a checkbox option if the writer wants to "include a memorable quote."
Instructed to write a "playful" obituary for a spirited, funny and faith-filled fake person, the AI tool said the man had been "born on a chilly day," "lived by the words of the great Groucho Marx," "inspired everyone" and died in a "sunny embrace," despite being given none of that information.
In other prompts, it invented fake nicknames, preferences and life events, even declaring that the man had established a community theater and mentored a "young comedian ... who went on to tour nationally."
James, a worker at a funeral home in Philadelphia who spoke on the condition of not including his last name because he was not authorized to discuss internal operations, said homes like his use ChatGPT to write obituaries all the time without telling their clients.
The AI, he said, has helped funeral directors spend more time handling all the logistical, legal and liturgical work surrounding most funerals, from filing burial paperwork to coordinating military honors and planning for dove releases.
But the tools are not without risks. Their tendency to make stuff up, known as "hallucinating," has led to some awkward errors, including returning obituaries in which a person's family members get mixed up.
When he uses ChatGPT to make an obituary, James said, he tells the AI not to use flowery language or make any assumptions about how a person died, such as that they "passed away peacefully" or were "surrounded by loved ones," as the tool wrote during one of his early attempts. "We don't know that it was a peaceful death, though we'd like to imagine it was," he said.
Funeral directors at his home, he said, offer the service free of charge and liken nondisclosure to sparing the family from being burdened with one more sensitive detail. "We're not gonna walk through every single step of how a cremation is done, either," he said.
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'A faster way to remember you'
For families wanting to go their own way, some developers have built consumer-facing AI obituary generators, promoting them as a more specialized way to announce a passing on social media or in the local newspaper than just asking ChatGPT.
George, the CelebrateAlly founder and a former program manager at Microsoft, launched her obituary maker after being surprised at how much people liked an AI-generated speech she delivered at a friend's wedding. Besides obituaries, the start-up offers AI generators for basically every piece of writing linked to a major life event, including love letters, proposal speeches, condolence messages and marriage vows.
The AI-obituary feature, which includes a brief questionnaire about the person's life (their surviving family members, how they died, whether they were "spiritual" or "resilient"), has written more than 250 obituaries since March, according to a breakdown she compiled for The Washington Post.
Most requesters asked the AI to use a "heartfelt" tone (52 percent), though 17 percent also wanted something "reflective / emotional." About 10 of the obituaries were for pets, she said.
As part of the breakdown, George asked Cursor, an AI coding tool, to give her an anonymized summary of people's obituary requests. "Funny memories and deeply personal quirks make the biggest impact," it said. "The ordinary -- like gardening, Sunday dinners or silly habits -- becomes sacred in memory."
The site charges $5 for 100 credits, with each text generation costing 10 credits, and toggles among different AI tools based on tone. For more creative writing, George has trained the system to use OpenAI's GPT4 Turbo, which she finds funnier. For more logical messages, like "100 reasons why I love my wife," the system turns to Anthropic's AI model, Claude.
George said she knows some people find these kinds of tools soulless and insincere. But she likened the idea to when her husband buys her a necklace: He didn't make it, but he did make an effort to show he cared.
Not everyone has appreciated how the systems work. Michael Worden, a designer and copywriter in Seattle, built an AI obituary generator last year after learning his mother was teaching a class in her retirement community about how seniors could write their own.
He created a 27-page, 110-question form -- asking about not just about life events but also the person's signature mannerisms, favorite celebrities and how they would have spent a perfect day -- and hooked it up to Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, an AI language model he prefers for creative writing.
More than 500 people have used the site to write obituaries so far, he said, but his mother wants nothing to do with it, arguing that the seniors she lives with will find it disheartening and dismissive to think "someone found a faster way to remember you and move on with their lives."
Worden suspects that kind of resistance will fade as the technology blooms. Where older people might see an AI obituary as inauthentic or reductive, he said, younger generations might see it as a way to show they care enough to want to get it right.
Young people "feel immense pressure to create the perfect farewell but worry their writing skills may not do justice to someone they deeply love," he wrote to a Post reporter -- with help, he said afterward, from AI.
Mary McGreevy, a Minnesota woman who reads and commentates obituaries on her popular TikTok account, Tips from Dead People, said she appreciates how the tools can help people when they're feeling stressed and uncreative.
She recalled a pair of sisters who said, "We couldn't see through our tears, but we had the facts, so we put them into ChatGPT and it got us 75 percent of the way there."
But she also worries that AI will lead to more tributes that feel "templated and airbrushed," like posthumous resumes. The best obituaries, she said, aren't lists of accomplishments but stories of flawed people that "act as a mirror to how we think about our own lives."
In laying out their value, she referred to the Japanese aesthetic principle of "wabi-sabi," in which an art piece's imperfections, like cracks in the ceramic, are displayed in such a way that "the art would not be complete without them."
"It's not the people who are talented writers whose obituaries go viral. It's the people who just lay it all out there ... to get to the imperfect heart of who that person was," she said. "Those are the ones I think truly help people in their grief. And they're not necessarily professional or polished at all."
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'Creative ideas for a graveside service'
Bob Treadway, a 65-year-old legal consultant in Lexington, Kentucky, said he's noticed -- or, at least, suspected -- a growing number of AI obituaries over the last few months: the paint-by-numbers phrases, the clunky sentences.
He reads his local paper's obit section every day to "get a sense generally of who's still around" and has learned from its pages of old friends and acquaintances passing away. But he's been saddened to see so many obits get replaced by stilted messages that read as if they were ripped from LinkedIn.
"You start getting up in years, and so do your friends, and they start dying ... and you want a sense of personal reflection," he said. "I've read some ... that have got where they went to school and that they had this business and that business, and it looks like they've taken it off their resume."
The use of AI-writing tools is expanding beyond families and funeral homes. When the Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner was killed last month in a Manhattan mass killing, the business news site Fortune said it used AI to "help with an initial draft" of an article summarizing her life.
But the shift toward automated writing has also brought with it a wave of online confusion. Some spammers and scam artists have used chatbots to make obituaries of the recently deceased, hoping to profit from the search traffic or on referrals for flowers or gifts.
The funeral industry nevertheless sees AI as the wave of the future. The company behind Passare is preparing an AI assistant so that a funeral director can ask for, say, "creative ideas for a graveside service," McQueen said.
Batesville, an Indiana-based maker of caskets and cremation urns, has offered an AI tool called Meaningful Selections that can assess a person's hobbies, military service or religious beliefs to filter out or promote different casket interior colors, remembrance jewelry, memorial stationery, personalized medallions and other "burial solutions."
And the second-place winner of the National Funeral Directors Association's Innovation Awards last year was an app called Nemu that uses an AI image analyzer to catalogue and appraise all the stuff left behind in a person's home so family members "can celebrate the memories they have of a loved one, not fight over them," as a promotional video said.
Fargo, the Nevada man who used ChatGPT to write his mother's obituary, still remembers the sense of relief he felt when the AI returned something he felt captured who she was. He said he believes "she'd be very happy with the end result" and said he hopes his three kids use one for him when he passes away.
He's thought about what new ChatGPT features he might use for his father's obituary, when the time comes. "This time I'm gonna use Deep Research mode," he said. "It's gonna be a banger."
