Fauxbituaries (Hyperfixed)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, hello, it's Wednesday. You're used to my voice, at least a little bit on today. We're taking a little bit of a breather, but we have something from friend of the show, Alex Goldman, his newish podcast, Hyperfixed. It's good. So it's here in the feed instead of us who are resting, but because we love you. and appreciate you. And I can't make my voice sound sincere, but I do mean that. We're going to have a little something extra for you on Friday. All right. Hyperfixed. Go. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, phobituaries.
I'm not sure how big this problem is. It could be on one end of the spectrum, just a lazy little nothing problem. On the other, we pull the thread and go down the rabbit hole, Alex. It could potentially lead into some sort of crazy syndicate bot farm thing.
This is Marcus. He's 35 years old. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia. And despite this adorably conspiratorial pitch he just made to me, Marcus is actually a very normal guy. He works in sustainability reporting. He just became a father. And he's married to a wonderful woman who he literally calls my wonderful wife. So how did the normal guy with the wonderful wife come to be talking about rabbit holes in syndicates? Well, it's actually a pretty sad story, and it started about two months ago. On February 16th, Marcus and his wife got a call. That kind of call that people in their 30s never expect to get. One of their very best friends had suddenly died, and the news had left them reeling. Not just because this friend was only 32 years old, but she was the kind of 32-year-old that seemed utterly unstoppable.
If she was a video game character, she was maxed out. She broke the game because she had so many more skill points than the average person. Her wit, so sharp. She was an ultra marathon runner. She would backcountry ski. She just excelled in every facet of what she did. And she did so many cool things. She honestly was just such an amazing life force. We were very lucky to have her as the MC at our wedding. And yeah, I mean, she was just...
He was awesome, Alex. It seemed impossible that this awesome, amazing life force could so suddenly be snuffed out. And yet, it was true.
What prompted Marcus to search for information about his friend's death?
So when they got the call that their friend had died, the first thing Marcus and his wife wanted to know was, how in the world did this happen? The person who called them hadn't told them the details. And although they knew her family, they didn't want to burden them with questions at such a tragic time.
So we ended up doing some Googling almost, I would say, hourly about information on our friend's passing, if there were news reports, if there was an obituary.
At first, there was nothing, just a total information vacuum. But within a day or two, notices about his friend's death did start popping up on the internet. At the top of Google search results, Marcus found links to these random small-time news sites, sites with names like Memoir News 360 and nycbreaking.site. And I mean, already one of these seemed weird, because why would a website called NYC Breaking, that's presumably about breaking news in New York City, be covering the death of a not-famous woman in Canada? But when Marcus began to click through and read the obituaries that these small time news sites had written for his friend, the weirdness just got weirder.
The names of her siblings and her parents were incorrect. Her age was reported off as high as 15 years. And like, how can you get someone's age wrong or the name of their parents in an obituary? That's like got to be step one or two, like the basic facts of the person.
Initially, it might have been easy to shrug this off as just sloppy reporting. But over the next few days, more of these weird obituaries began popping up on the internet. And while there was no doubt that the person they were referring to was indeed his friend, because they mentioned her name, and the city she lived in, and the company she worked for, aside from some vague platitudes about how she, quote, believed that workplaces should be supportive environments and also embraced the thrill of winter sports, nearly every other detail in these obituaries was wrong.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:43
2
What prompted Marcus to search for information about his friend's death?
2:43–17:30
3
How did Marcus discover AI-written obituaries?
17:30–21:59
4
What inaccuracies did Marcus find in the obituaries?
21:59–27:28
5
How are AI obituaries generated and who profits from them?
27:28–40:40