AI Obituary Pirates Are Exploiting Our Grief. I Tracked One Down to Iceland...
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 Rise of AI-Generated Obituaries
The errors jumped out immediately. Her cause of death was listed as autism. The obituary chronicled a funeral that hadn't happened yet. In other ways, it was eerily accurate. Jamie did have an optimistic spirit and a dedication to helping others. It alluded constantly to health issues, which the obituary "writer" seemed to think had something to do with autism.
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.
The Influence of AI in Writing
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.
The Dark Side of AI Obituaries
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.
The Exploitation of Grief
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. AI obituary websites make their money through ads.
Tracking Down an AI Obituary Writer
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."
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.
