New: When someone dies, Google is filled with clickbait articles about their death — even non-celebrity, private individuals. Even children. I wrote about the cruelty of SEO obituary spam, and how sites are now using generative AI to produce even more content. www.theverge.com/24065145/ai-...
AI-generated obituaries are beginning to litter search results, turning the deaths of private individuals into clunky, repetitive content.
what the absolute fuck
That first week or whatever when chatgpt hit zeitgeist, I did a search for “regenerate response” and found this and my heart broke completely. Muriel deserved a human to sit down and write her obituary and couldn’t even get someone who’d delete the prompt www.jjduffyfuneralhome.com/obituary/mur...
CUMBERLAND Muriel L. Squires, known to many as the charming bartender from the High Seas Lounge, in Haines City, FL. has passed away at the age of 90. Although she may have left us, her memory will li...
I felt like I was shouting this into a void when it happened to my friend. It was so fast and so complete that it was almost impossible to find real information on services, memorials etc.
Worse, I've seen such obituaries pop up in search results even when the person is alive.
They also spam Facebook Groups.
THANK YOU. I hate this so so so much.
Thank you for covering this weird, ugly phenomenon so well. These sites added stress and sadness to a really awful loss for me last year.
I am tempted to google search my moms name, who died a bit over a year ago... but I also don't really need to shove a railroad spike into my mental health today.
Thank you for writing. This is disturbing, and certainly demonstrates the continuing decline of the utility of Google, as well as a whole new misinformation vector to watch out for.
This is straight up depraved. I'm not sure how this doesn't fall under desecrating the deceased.