A Computer Wrote My Mother’s Obituary - The Atlantic
The funeral director said “AI” ... of memorial services, like caskets or flowers. Of all places, I had not expected artificial intelligence to follow me into the small, windowless room of the mortuary. But here it was, ready to assist me in the task of making sense of death. It was already Wednesday, and I’d just learned that I had to write an obituary for my mother by ... The funeral director said “AI” as if it were a normal element of memorial services, like caskets or flowers. Of all places, I had not expected artificial intelligence to follow me into the small, windowless room of the mortuary. But here it was, ready to assist me in the task of making sense of death. It was already Wednesday, and I’d just learned that I had to write an obituary for my mother by Thursday afternoon if I wanted it to run in Sunday’s paper.The funeral director told me I would be given access to this AI tool in the funeral-planning online account that she had already created for me. I still had a few misgivings. Would I be sullying Mom’s memory by doing this? I glanced over at an advertisement for another high-tech service—one that could make lab-grown diamonds from my mother’s ashes or her hair.The back-and-forth made me realize that Mom’s memorial would be no more sullied by AI than it was by the very fact of using this software—a kind of Workday app for death and burial. In the end, the software failed us. My funeral director couldn’t figure out how to give me access to the AI obituary writer, so I had to write one myself, using my brain and fingertips.AI could help me do this. The software would compose the notice for me. 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.
