(The Atlantic) – As a professional writer, my first thought was that this would be unnecessary, at best. At worst, it would be an outrage. The philosopher Martin Heidegger held that someone’s death is a thing that is truly their own. Now I should ask a computer to announce my mother’s, by way of a statistical model?

“Did you say AI?” I asked the funeral director, thinking I must have been dissociating. But yes, she did. As we talked some more, my skepticism faded. The obituary is a specialized form. When a person of note dies, many newspapers will run a piece that was commissioned and produced years in advance: a profile of the deceased. But when a normal person dies—and this applies to most of us—the obituary is something else: not a standard piece of journalistic writing, but a formal notice, composed in brief, that also serves to celebrate the person’s life. I had no experience in producing anything like the latter. The option to use AI was welcome news. (Read More)