In June of last year, my brother was admitted to the hospital — the beginning of an eight-month decline that ended in liver failure. He had struggled with alcohol for years, a byproduct of the anxiety that plagued him throughout his life.
His decline was difficult to witness, especially because my family and I didn’t understand at first how dire his prognosis was. As his damaged liver gradually stopped processing toxins, fluids began to build up in his abdomen and legs. His skin and eyes turned yellow. Toxins filled his brain, causing encephalopathy and confusion. My brother rambled to himself, cycling through anxious thoughts ranging from childhood bullies to his recent work relationships.
On the last day of this past January, my brother was again admitted to the hospital and put on life support. He was sustained by machines, tubes, and computers. With no hope for recovery, the family and medical staff at his bedside made the painful decision to remove him from life support. He died shortly afterward. Upon learning of my brother’s death, I booked a plane ticket from my home in Seattle back to New Hampshire, where I grew up and where my parents and my brother’s family still live.
Flying over the frozen landscape below me, I grappled with the reality my family and I now faced: the loss of another sibling and child.
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Twenty years earlier, we had lost my other brother to an undetected congenital heart defect. He was 18. I was 11. By the time he collapsed due to cardiac arrest at his college’s rowing practice, nothing could be done for him. He was pronounced dead at the very same hospital where my oldest brother had just died. My parents losing one child and me losing a sibling was unthinkable. Losing two felt impossible.
My first morning in New Hampshire, my parents and I joined my brother’s widow at the funeral home. We decided on what to do with his remains. We chose the urn he’d be placed in. We discussed writing and publishing an obituary. Afterward, at my parents’ home over breakfast, my brother’s widow received a call from her sister. She had googled my brother’s name and, to her surprise, there were already obituaries for him on the internet.
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So I got out my phone and searched for his name. Google returned a long list of obituaries for my brother, but they were littered with inaccuracies. It was immediately clear that these obituaries were written by generative AI on behalf of the scammers who published them. They were fabricated recollections of my brother’s life, dressed in flowery prose.
Most were benign, but all of them were false. One claimed that my brother was once employed as a leatherworker and watercolor artist. In real life, my brother was a high school art teacher. Headers included “An Artist’s Journey,” “Watercolor Paintings’ Vibrancy,” and “A Global Loss Experienced.”
Some of the obits announced nonexistent arrangements that were made to honor his legacy: “To honor his memory and celebrate the influence he had on those around him, memorials, art shows, and tributes are arranged.”
One obituary just regurgitated my grandmother’s obituary from over a decade ago.
These obituaries were paired with clickbait advertisements. Headlines included “Surprising Signs That Parasites Are Living Inside Your Body,” “Melania Finally Admits What Disorder Barron Suffers From,” and “Diabetes Is Not From Sweets! Meet the True Enemy.”
Another site barraged me with spam pop-ups about computer viruses and asked me to allow site notifications on my desktop. That same site included crude advertisements for adult browser games named Lust Goddess and Booty Heroes.
I reached out to these websites to get the obituaries taken down and received only silence.
The people who published these obituaries and the artificial intelligence that wrote them didn’t know my brother. The obituaries and accompanying advertisements made a mockery out of my brother’s death. They piled grief upon a family already in mourning. It felt as if my brother’s life had been turned into a caricature: a figment of an artificial imagination.
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The motivation behind these obituaries was clear. When someone dies, friends and family go to the internet and search for the deceased. This drives website traffic and, potentially, ad revenue. People die every day, and it’s easy for scammers to monitor online death notices, social media posts, and other public records. Obituaries are a never-ending source of new content. In our case, we suspect scammers targeted my brother when a family member announced his death on Facebook the day after he died. Robert Wahl, an AI expert and professor of computer science at Concordia University Wisconsin, is quoted in a CNN article saying that obituaries are cheap to create and the revenue can be enough to provide a living for some overseas scammers.
It’s not just the deceased and their loved ones whom scammers target. AI-generated fake nudes reveal an extreme of how AI can assist bad actors in exploiting people. Scammers can use AI to impersonate loved ones and ask for money and personal information. Even in death, my brother wasn’t able to escape AI-aided spam.
In 2003, when my first brother died, the internet was relatively primitive. To this day, I find myself googling his name to find digital evidence that he once lived. When AOL shut down its instant messenger platform in 2017, I mourned the loss of all the chats I had had with my brother. But I am able to have confidence in the authenticity of his digital footprint. I know that my parents wrote the obituaries that you can still find online. I know that the articles written about his death were authored in earnest by people who loved him.
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Tech companies are taking some steps to crack down on scams. This year, Google changed its search algorithm to deprioritize listings that appear to be AI-generated scams. Google’s director of product management, Elizabeth Tucker, announced that those changes had resulted in a 45 percent reduction in “spammy” and “unoriginal” content. But I am doubtful that mere algorithm changes will be able to overcome the malevolent force of artificial intelligence in the hands of scammers.
The AI obits written about my brother are evidence of the accelerating undercurrent of content grift and misinformation. It’s all too easy with AI to use people’s likenesses and stories for profit.
We are all vulnerable to digital exploitation in increasingly unexpected ways. My brother’s death taught me that. And compounding the problem, it is nearly impossible to remove anything from the internet.
We published our own obituary for my brother. It serves as a record of his life and pays service to who he was as a person. We had it printed in newspapers and it was uploaded to the internet, alongside the fake obituaries. Of course, aggregator sites republished the real obituary without our consent.
Now, seven months after his death, I am again finding myself going to the internet to search for what traces are left of the brother I lost 20 years after the first. Reading people’s comments on the obituary we wrote is restorative. One commenter, who knew him during college, remembered my brother as someone who lived fiercely and supported those he loved. They wrote: “At the time, we were both trying to find our place in the world and with others. As I followed him on social media, I was so grateful to see he had found both in his life. My only regret is that I didn’t reach out in person.”
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For better or for worse, the internet is an archive of our existence, and everyone deserves to have the memory of their loved ones treated with dignity and respect — not exploited for posthumous pennies.
Erik Frid is a Seattle-based writer and software product manager.