Alex Goldman

Thanks for doing this.

This is Joe Supan.

He's a senior reporter at CNET, and he usually writes about technology and broadband.

But the reason he started looking into these AI obituaries is because back in January of 2024, his family found themselves facing this very same issue.

And it started the morning after his sister died.

There were details in the obituary that would have flagged for anyone who knew Joe's sister.

But there were also details that should have flagged for anyone at all.

Like her reported cause of death was autism.

So Joe began to investigate.

And what he found was not some high-tech criminal syndicate, but a basic clickbait scheme powered by AI and human grief.

According to Joe, it generally begins on Facebook with an open post from someone who loved someone sharing the news that that someone has died.

And if the post contains certain phrases, think tragic loss or taken too soon, an alert will get triggered.

This is someone to watch.

From there, scammers will monitor Google search trends to see if people online are searching for information about this person that's died.

And frequently, when people die young or unexpectedly, as was the case with Marcus's friend, there are a lot of people searching.

Suddenly, that first Facebook post, and any subsequent engagement from the comments, it all becomes grist for the mill.

Scammers will scrape through social media for information about this person and their life, and then feed it to the AI, which quickly stitches together something resembling a formal obituary.

It doesn't matter if there's barely any actual information, or if the information's wrong, or if the AI hallucinated nearly every detail of this person's life, because ultimately it's just bait to lure confused, grieving people from Facebook or Google search results onto websites they would never otherwise visit, generating page views that translate into ad dollars for as long as people are searching for the information.

which often ends the moment the family's able to collect themselves enough to write their own official obituary.

But who exactly is running these sites?