WaPo Trend Alert: Using Chatbots To Write Obituaries

August 3, 2025 Business, Technology

The Washington Post reports:

Two days after Jeff Fargo’s mother died, he lay in bed, crying, at home in Nevada and opened his laptop to ChatGPT. Her friends had asked about an obituary, so for nearly an hour he typed about her life: that she had been a single mom in a male-dominated world, that she never got the credit she was owed, that she was loved. After a few seconds, the chatbot offered its condolences and a short passage memorializing her as an avid golfer known for her “kindness and love of dogs.” After it was published in her community’s newspaper, her friends said it captured her beautifully.

Funeral directors are increasingly asking the relatives of the deceased whether they would prefer for AI to write the obituary, rather than take on the task themselves. Josh McQueen, the vice president of marketing and product for the funeral-home management software Passare, said its AI tool has written tens of thousands of obituaries nationwide in the last few years. Tech start-ups are also working to build obituary generators that are available to everyone in their time of grief, for a small fee.  The AI tools’ speed has made them quite popular in the “death care” industry.

Read the full article. Of note, I did spell my instructions correctly when I asked Elon Musk’s chatbot to create the image above.



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