Thoughts on this article about using AI for obituaries [View all]

[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.