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Posted on 06/20/2025 1:06:05 PM PDT by Red Badger
After the death of my sister, I was pulled into the troubling world of AI-written obituaries. This is what I learned about grief, scams and the people behind the words.
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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.
We cook AI-generated recipes and talk to AI therapists. To a murkier degree, we probably even watch AI TV shows, listen to AI songs and read AI articles. And most of all, we use it to write: letters and emails, term papers and blog posts, wedding vows and breakup texts.
Nearly three out of every four web pages created in April 2025 contained AI-generated content, according to the web analytics platform Ahrefs. AI obituaries are a small part of a larger ecosystem known as AI slop, a term that refers to useless, misleading and downright weird output from artificial intelligence.
It's a big part of our lives in 2025 and — evidently — our afterlives, too. Still, the stakes feel uniquely personal when it comes to memorializing a real person. In a cruel twist, the greater the outpouring of grief from humans on social media, the greater the outpouring from AI.
The first days after a death often create a data void where people are searching for information, and families are too overwhelmed and disoriented to provide it. Opportunists, including criminal networks around the world, are more than happy to fill that void. The more a death is being posted about, the more fake obituaries you'll see.
"That's going to drive up the click count," says Robert Wahl, a professor of computer science at Concordia University Wisconsin who's been tracking AI obituaries over the past year. "They're going to get more hits and generate more revenue."
AI obituary websites make their money through ads, and because the barrier to entry is so low, a handful of clicks means it's probably worth somebody's time.
But where were these pages coming from? And how were they spreading with such astonishing speed? What is it about grief that leaves us so vulnerable to scammers?
I spent weeks lurking on Facebook, talking to AI experts and tracking down one prolific AI obituary writer to learn more about the elaborate global economy of grief.
As that obit pirate explained to me, it's about anything that attracts attention. "I don't base it all on obituaries," he says. "I do accidents, anything crime."
The obituary spam cycle It's a natural instinct to connect with others when someone dies. For a lot of us, that means posting on social media.
"This reaching out is asking others, please see me. Please see this pain. Please see this new void in my life and honor that with me," says Joanne Cacciatore, a professor of social work at Arizona State University and the author of Bearing the Unbearable.
"When we're going through some of the deepest, hardest things in life, such as grief, online forums can be enormously powerful and connective for people," says Rebecca Soffer, author of The Modern Loss Handbook. "They can help people feel like they're really part of a community and being seen and heard."
But this unknowingly kicks off a cycle of AI obituary spam. I tracked this dozens of times in the weeks I spent researching this story, and the velocity of the process was breathtaking: a sincere human would share the news on Facebook and within hours, there would be a dozen accounts sharing links to AI obits.
Some of these were from accounts like Memorial Farewell (0 followers), while others purported to be real journalists. One, named "Katherine cathy," provided the eerie intro, "News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media."
When I searched the names of people who'd recently passed away on Google with "death" or "obituary," the top results were always to AI obituary sites. (Another CNET editor tells me he's often encountered similar search results.) I could even watch a YouTube version of the obituary, complete with stock photos of candles and police cars — but only after I sat through an ad for Sling TV.
This cycle wears itself out pretty quickly. After a day or two, Google's search results are usually populated with legitimate sites, and the obituary pages and YouTube videos are often nowhere to be found.
"We block billions of spammy pages from appearing in Search every day," a Google spokesperson tells me. "Recent updates to our spam policies have significantly reduced the presence of spammy obituary pages in Search, and many of the examples shared had already been detected and removed by our own systems. On YouTube, we rigorously enforce our policies prohibiting spam, deceptive practices."
But by the time they're removed, the damage is often done. Traffic peaks in the hours and days immediately following a person's death. Even as the AI obit sites recede into the background, many readers have already absorbed false information about the deceased person. Many of the sites I visited also employed malicious redirects and fake virus warnings to wring even more revenue from my visit, but most of the time, the scam was more mundane: They just stole my attention for a few seconds.
My conversation with an obituary pirate When I looked up the obituary websites on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — an international nonprofit that acts as an address book for internet domains — a shocking number of them returned home addresses in Iceland. The country has powerful privacy laws in place and has become a haven for website owners looking to shield their identities.
The mailing address for many of these websites — including the one that published that initial obituary on Jamie — is Kalkofnsvegur 2, Reykjavik. This also happens to be the address of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, described on its website as "the world's only genuine penis museum."
"People like to pick that address, in part because it's basically a big F-U to people like you or me who are trying to figure out who's actually behind them," says Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who studies online interactions.
Where these sites are located beyond that is anyone's guess, but most people I spoke with point to countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
"You need somebody to design the botnet. You need somebody to sort of design the scam," says Walter Scheirer, author of the 2023 book A History of Fake Things on the Internet. "You have to create the accounts trade with the advertising ecosystem that you're trying to play."
"There's a longstanding set of criminal networks in Sub-Saharan Africa," Scheirer says. "In other cases, some of these things come from organized crime networks. In some cases, nation-states are running money laundering operations through criminal elements in other countries that they have some loose control over or support in some way."
One site that's particularly active on Facebook, obitsfarewell.com, is registered in Abuja, Nigeria. For weeks, no one responded to my repeated emails, phone calls, text messages and Facebook messages.
I eventually found a Facebook page called News Today (416 followers) that posts exclusively links to obitsfarewell.com pages. I messaged the account asking for an interview, and the admin agreed to a call over WhatsApp.
He identified himself as Harry John and said he'd been running obitsfarewell.com for about six months, which lined up exactly with the registration date on ICANN. He confirmed that he lived in Nigeria and said he also pays one other person to share links to his obituaries on Facebook.
He tells me he chose these topics specifically because he can monetize them for the most ad revenue.
"I use ChatGPT any time I write anything concerning obits," he says. "When I get the news, I use ChatGPT to translate my words, my articles. Once I translate it, I take it to my WordPress and then post it on my Facebook."
When I was trying to track down the source of these websites, I messaged dozens of accounts that posted links to AI obits. John told me he was on the other end of several of them.
"You sent three, four messages each on my Facebook," he says. "I'm the one. Same Facebook, same website."
John said he couldn't tell me how he decides who to write about, only that he focuses on popular or famous people. I didn't recognize any of the names I saw on his site, but I did notice that the obituary subjects he picked corresponded with high engagement on Facebook. John said that he has a source where he gets his news, but he wouldn't tell me what it was: "You can't expect me to give you my source of income."
He insisted that all of his pages go through a fact-checking process on Google and Facebook.
"Any obituary news I post, I must double-check everywhere to know that this thing is genuine before I post it on Facebook," he says.
I asked John if he ever felt bad that he might be sharing false information about people who'd died, but he insisted that his content was always accurate.
I thought back to those furious moments when my parents and I read the first AI obituary on Jamie. When I told people that story, they always expressed disbelief. How could people be so morally bankrupt?
But once I got on the phone with John, it suddenly felt laughable to think of him as some type of criminal mastermind. He was trying to make a living, just like me.
Before our call ended, he asked me if I'd be interested in working with him.
"You get more traffic if someone from the US posts," he explained.
How obituary piracy works It's hard to say exactly when these AI obituaries first began appearing, but they've clearly exploded in the past year.
NewsGuard, a misinformation watchdog that tracks AI content, identified just 49 sites as "unreliable AI-generated news sites" with little human oversight when it started tracking them in May 2023. That number stands at 1,200 today.
"A lot of the sites are specific and focused solely on creating obituaries, whereas others are just basic content farms that publish a range of content," says McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard's AI and Foreign Influence editor.
I found more than 20 websites publishing AI obituaries while researching this story, but I got the sense that the true number was much higher — and impossible to definitively capture. They seemed to come and go in rapid succession. One day I'd see one on a domain like deltademocrattimes.space; the next day it would redirect to a page of cascading popups that crashed my browser.
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The big takeaway is don’t post things on social media.
Oh, there’s a bigger, sadder takeaway than that from this article.
The big takeaway is don’t post things on social media.
~~~
That’s like telling a junky not to smoke the crack
“’We block billions of spammy pages from appearing in Search every day,’ a Google spokesperson tells me.”
It ain’t all they block...
I’ve seen a lot of sites that purport to tell celebrities’ net worth, relationship status, etc.
They’re almost always full of obvious errors and silly fluff; for some reason I’ve gotten the feeling that a lot of them may originate with China.
(There are people sites, like ‘my life’, that are full of errors too.)
Don’t take the Brown Acid!.................
I have NEVER used AI for anything, shall NEVER use AI for anything as long as I live, and the excuses that the person made, who wrote the article ( “he’s only trying to make a living” ) is the height of DISGUSTING!
It would be funny if it were not so stupid.
Don’t post things on antisocial media!
You can fully believe it when my AI orbit says that I was so handsome beyond measure that tons of women in Ukraine were anxious to meet me.
“..he asked me if I’d be interested in working with him..
You get more traffic if someone in the US posts.”
The Writer should not be too surprised if in the future, he discovers that “Harry John”, the Nigerian decides to incorporate the Writer’s onscreen name and email anyway, whether approval was given or not.
It’s like dealing with a Poltergeist, any kind of direct contact can stalk and taint you, setting you up for some future, yet unannounced utility.
Complaining all over the internet that they don’t have any privacy.
I've seen this myself a number of times. Once, when the husband of an elderly Jewish neighbor of my in-laws passed away, they were at her door the next day after the funeral. She was expecting them and chased them down the street with a broom.
Now, that’s a Widow with plenty of chutzpah!
We use AI every day without knowing it.
Bookmark.
When SlingTV buys an ad on youtube — does it have any control over content, or do they just get what they get?
I would think advertising on fake obituary videos would be counterproductive for them....not sure though...
I’m old enough to have been taught how to write and would be humiliated if anything I wrote was alleged to have been written by some AI program, thank you very much.
But I love having google use AI to answer my casual questions, always keeping in mind that the answers could be dead wrong. But it’s a good first level cut on what the nutritional values are on a specific weight of food, or random questions about health issues. Those answers I’ll usually put through my primary care doctor in quotes if I’m seriously interested.
Wondering if these obit thieves scour FR as well, since we often get sad news posted here.
It’s not just content thieves in Nigeria and such. Whoever controls Wikipedia these days steals a great deal of content without the attribution that they used to give.
Please elaborate.
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