Joe Supan

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

The day after my sister died, I remember like this very clear moment where my mom and my dad and I were driving to her husband's house and my mom got a call from my aunt saying she had seen this obituary on Facebook and like, did we write that or where was this coming from?

Seemed a little fishy.

So she sent it to my mom and my mom started reading it in the car and all these inaccuracies jumped out immediately.

I was offended and I was repulsed by it.

I also felt fascinated by it.

I was like, where were these details coming from?

Like, who is writing these pages?

Just how is this whole process working?

People want information about what happened to this person, and that's where these AI obituary writers jump in.

Yeah, that was a little harder to figure out, but I did end up getting to talk to one person who runs some of these websites.

Yeah, I was just messaging a bunch of these obituary pages on Facebook, and some of them would be ostensibly news websites.

They would cover crime, obituaries, anything like that.

Some of them were...

purporting to be reporters who were covering this news.

I probably messaged like 50 of these types of accounts.

And then I just got lucky.

I just someone responded to me.

And he actually said, like, you've messaged me a bunch, like all of the this account, that account, those are all me.