Thoughts on this article about using AI for obituaries

[genxlib]

This article is fairly opinionated about the concept and I think unfairly so. It broadens the discussion to all kinds of personal writings but the lede is definitely targeting obits.

https://www.vox.com/even-better/397448/chatgpt-obituary-speech-writing-gemini-claude-deepseek

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn’t know where to start. The grief wasn’t helping either. “I was just like, there’s no way I can do this,” the 31-year-old from Los Angeles says.

Around the same time, he’d begun using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, tinkering with the technology to create grocery lists and budgeting tools. What if it could help him with the obituary? King fed ChatGPT some details about his grandmother — she was a retired nurse who loved bowling and had a lot of grandkids — and asked it to write an obituary.

The result provided the scaffolding for one of life’s most personal pieces of writing. King tweaked the language, added more details, and revised the obituary with the help of his mother. Ultimately, King felt ChatGPT helped him commemorate his grandmother with language that adequately expressed his emotions. “I knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life,” King, who works in video production for a luxury handbag company, says. “It didn’t matter that it was from ChatGPT.”

I have a confession to make. I recently used the AI at Legacy.com to write my Father's Obituary. I thought it did a lovely job and saved me the angst of trying to get it just right.

I think this article is unfair for a couple of reasons.

First of all, an obituary is very formulaic and has an unusual structure that is neither prose or poetry. Done poorly, it is just a list of facts. Done well, it is still a list of facts woven into a structure that is readable and expresses the familiar bonds represented by those facts.

Second of all, an obituary is not a eulogy. It is the journalistic version of the story, not the editorial one. It is meant to be personalized but not necessary personal. There are other avenues for that expression.

Anyway, it worked for me. My Mother loved it and she was the only person I was really trying to please.

[Think. Again.]

1. If the most important things to him about his grandmother were...

"..she was a retired nurse who loved bowling and had a lot of grandkids."

Then maybe it's best he didn't trouble himself to tell the world what she meant to him.

[genxlib]

2. That is not how an obituary is written

They are not meant to convey the feelings of the particular writer. They are meant to describe all of the loved ones that are impacted by the death.

In my case, my Father was survived by his wife, multiple siblings and multiple other offspring. It would have been incredibly inappropriate for me to express my specific personal feelings in particular just because I was the one writing it. It was first and foremost about him and secondly about every one of the people who loved him. I just happened to be the one that put it together.

Again, I think you are prescribing the wrong purpose to the obituary.

[Renew Deal]

3. Are obituaries even necessary?

Why does the world need all that information connecting relatives together? Anyone that needs to know will know and everyone else doesn’t need to know.

[genxlib]

4. They are largely a shell of what they used to be

Connected to the same downfall that has affected all of print media.

But I will say that it was necessary in our case.

For one, it was important to my mother to see her husband of 63 years remembered in this way. She regularly reads the obits and believes that many people in her generation do.

Second, my Dad lived in real life. He carried no phone and had no social media profile. But he loved people and spent time with them in real life. For instance he worked 20 years in retirement at the local grocery store. He interacted with the community and hundreds of people knew him by name and many would have wanted to know. There was no way to reach those people. I don't know if we did reach them but we tried.

There is one thing I will add is that printed obituaries have become a profit center like everything else in the media. It is a minimum of $70ish and there is a considerable cost to do anything beyond the minimum. It is a shame but most people won't bother with the expense but like I said, it was important to my mother.

I would also add that even if you don't publish one, it is customary for the funeral home to have one developed. It is often used in the announcements and invitations to the services.

[MineralMan]

5. Whatever works, I say.

When both of my parents died on the same day at the age of 96, I needed to write a obituary for the local papers. Both were well-known in the smallish town where they lived. My father was the long time fire chief, as well. Their life story was a wonderful one.

So, I wrote the obituary the same day they died, and got it to the places it needed to get to. It ended up on the front page of two newspapers. Since I have made my living as a professional writer, it was pretty easy for me to do, once I got past the emotional issues involved with writing an obituary for your own parents.

If an AI bot can help someone write an obituary, I see no problem with that. The information to be included is pretty standard and other facts that make an obituary interesting to readers can also be supplied. Putting it all together is the hard part. AI can do that just fine. Maybe not as well as I could. Maybe not a front page obituary.

But, in difficult times, whatever works is just fine, as long as it works.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. "Provided the scaffolding" is the important takeaway. Nothing wrong with seeking help ...

whether it's from a family member, a professional writer, or a software tool. Just don't publish it unfiltered and unedited, as some "news" outlets are doing with important news events.

[highplainsdem]

7. I'm so sorry you lost your father.

I do wish you hadn't used AI to write the obituary, and I hope you won't use AI to write anything in the future, for reasons I've gone into in lots of other threads here. Generative AI tools like the one you used are unethical, based on theft of intellectual property.

They save you from having to think, but that is NOT a good thing for Homo sapiens. They're handy dumb-yourself-down tools.

And using them undercuts your credibility. If you used a chatbot to write an obituary, you might have used one to write all or part of your messages here. Last year I was discussing this with two teachers on Twitter who'd written books about using genAI, approving of its use, but had both also written fiction that they hoped to sell, and they were worried that agents and editors might not believe they'd written that fiction themselves (as they said they had) since they'd used AI for other types of writing. I had to tell them they were probably right about that. I've posted threads here about science fiction magazines that will permanently refuse submissions from anyone they catch trying to pass off AI-generated text as their own.

You wrote of using that chatbot:

I thought it did a lovely job and saved me the angst of trying to get it just right.

The same would have been true if you'd had someone else write it for you.

But for your own sake, your own feelings and your own coping with loss, it would have been best to write it yourself. As it is, you're feeling so defensive about it that you even brought it up here.

And feeling angst about writing something important is normal. It's what you should feel.

You can't undo having used AI for the obituary. But you can avoid using it in the future, so you don't disable your own ability to write and leave people wondering if you really wrote any text from you that they see.

[genxlib]

8. I appreciate your thoughts

And your comments on AI are thoughtful and well articulated.

All I can say is that this was a one off for me. I value my writing capabilities and would not generally hand them off to anyone let alone an AI.

I guess I just don't really think of an obituary as a very creative process. They are so unique in format and structure that it does not feel natural. If anything, I think my writing of it would have gone outside of the boundaries of what is typical. Not that there would be anything wrong with that but the goal was something fairly traditional.

And I don't want to undersell my role in it. I supplied 90% of the content and the AI simply provided the framework to put that into the very specific format that Obits follow.

As to letting someone else do it instead...I don't believe there was anyone suitable. There were probably not more than 5 other people who would even be close enough to be able to and they were all no better suited than me from a capability, time, grief perspective. I certainly wouldn't feel any better about the authenticity of the action if I had outsourced it to someone more distant from my Dad.

Thanks for your thoughts and I will keep them in mind.