Latest tribute from chatbot: Fake obituaries flood the Internet

Scammers are using artificial intelligence to create fake obituaries and make money from shock and grief.

There are more and more fake deaths online, as The Verge reports. Scammers create them using artificial intelligence applications such as chatbots to quickly create content for websites where they make money through advertising.

There are two different ways. On the one hand, legitimate obituaries from ordinary people, posted on funeral home websites, are used as the basis for AI-generated texts.

AI rewrites the obituary, sometimes supplementing it with other real or invented details about the person's life and inserting a lot of keywords that people often search for in order to get a good position in search results.

Declared dead for profit

However, in other cases, obituaries are also written for lively people, which often shocks friends and acquaintances of the supposed deceased, and of course prompts them to access the site and thus fall into the trap of scammers.

Since most people don't have a prominent online presence, false deaths often end up at the top of search results. So, if you were to Google what your old school friend is doing today, you could quickly get scammed. The psychological damage caused by believing that a loved one has died is acceptable.

The deluge of artificial intelligence is making search engines increasingly unusable

Thanks to artificial intelligence, these obituaries can be generated automatically en masse. Since writing obituaries requires almost no effort, scammers make a profit with just a few clicks. Some scam sites do not limit themselves to advertising to generate income. They also offer to deliver flowers to the funeral, which of course don't arrive.

Google says it is working to remove false obituaries from its results. But when someone who wrote a false obituary contacted Google, there was an automatic response that the website in question did not violate Google's guidelines, The Verge reports.

Studies have also shown that the quality of search engines like Google is constantly decreasing, also as a result of artificial intelligence. This makes creating spam easier than ever.