Writing an obituary is not an easy task. That’s an understatement — it’s incredibly painful and usually also costly.
Or maybe not. Consider letting AI do it for you.
That’s the pitch Empathy, a platform that supports recently deceased family members, is making with the launch of a new tool that uses AI to draft obituaries. The tool, called Finding Words, generates orbits from basic information provided by family members.
“With the overwhelming number of tasks and emotional strains grieving families face, Finding Words is dedicated to helping people worry less about the task of drafting obituary text and respecting the memory and legacy of their loved ones. ,” the company wrote to me in a pitch email.
However, not everyone agrees. Offloading the work of writing an obituary to an AI doesn’t sound particularly sensitive, at least not to my ears. Wouldn’t your family want to be more involved in writing the memories of their loved ones’ lives? Wouldn’t it be nice to let AI handle the work, somehow lowering the cost or making it feel more thoughtful?
I asked Empathy CEO Ron Gura.
“Many people who have lost a family member struggle to write a personal and thoughtful eulogy for their loved one for a variety of reasons,” he told me in an email interview. “They may be so emotionally overwhelmed that they don’t know where to start or are preoccupied with the sheer amount of paperwork that usually follows a loss.” It’s so hard to sit in front of a blank screen and feel like you’re letting your family and loved ones down.Any support that can guide people through this process is beneficial and such. It is imperative that access to support is democratized and made available to as many people as possible, and generative AI acts as an equalizer in this regard.”
Those are fair points. So, to try out Finding Words, I inserted dummy information and had the tool write her Obit. (Cause of death: Grease fire, which seemed plausible enough in New York City.)
Feed the Finding Words data to fuel that algorithm.
The tool walks you through a questionnaire that provides prompts for the deceased’s name, date of birth, date of death, place of death, last residence, etc. Some of the questions were more specific, such as “Please share relevant details regarding the venue, date and time, or special guidelines for your ceremony,” and asked whether people had served in the military and what people often said about them. It is related to many aspects of a person’s life, such as what happened. , their proudest achievements and your favorite memories together.
Many of the questions are self-sufficient and responses can vary in length from a few words to a few paragraphs. Gura said Flow is modeled after obituary writing services commonly offered by funeral homes and professional obituary writing companies.
“With Finding Words, Empathy empowers individuals by helping them work through this process, offering a free service,” he added. “This tool helps people understand what is typically included in an obituary, lets users consider the details, memories, and anecdotes that are essential in drafting a personalized obituary, and ultimately Constructs the entered details into a cohesive text.”
Find Words’ obits may not win any awards, but frankly, it was better than expected (certainly compared to ChatGPT’s attempt). In my testing, the prompt answers were fairly relative and non-specific, but the AI made them coherent. (To be fair, most deaths that is Formulaic — to the point where a cursory Google search yields dozens of templates.) If I hadn’t been told, I would have suspected AI was involved in the writing process.
Generative AI, including the type of text-generating AI that underpins Finding Words, tends to produce untrue or questionable text. Nothing was observed in my testing. But just to be thorough, I asked Gura if there were any precautions Empathy had taken.
“Finding Words is powered by AI algorithms trained and refined by Empathy’s team of developers, writers and grief experts, and is based on insights from thousands of obituary samples… The AI model is trained to produce cohesive results that accurately reflect the details of the user input,” said Gra. “We take care to inform users that the text generated by Finding Words is fully automated and advise them to review the text thoroughly to ensure all information is correct. ”
A completed AI-generated Obit.
Will Finding Words make obit writing services obsolete? I doubt it—those services tend to be more bespoke. (Sorry for being the bearer of bad news, career obituary writer.) In fact, with some fine-tuning, the results can be very good. . for Marvin Minsky).
However, given the plagiarism of generative AI, it’s tricky how Empathy trains the linguistic algorithms that power Finding Words. Gura didn’t disclose where the aforementioned sample her orbits came from, nor did Empathy use user data to tweak them. (I have sent a follow-up email for clarification.) In any case, whether or not the creators of the training data are fairly compensated (and provided adequate information), Empathy is venture-backed and has raised $43 million. Date — You are definitely under pressure from investors to monetize. I wouldn’t be surprised if Finding Words adds a fee in the future.
“of Clause of our plan for discover wordswe are constantly collecting user feedback, reviewing all generated obituaries, and regularly adjusting our templates and prompts to improve the quality of our draft obituaries,” Gura said. says.
