“Where do I even start?” says Bridget Todd, the creator and host of the podcast There are No Girls on the Internet. “It’s just been a real motherfucker. I feel like I’m still processing it all.”

In early July, Todd lost her mother Carolyn Todd, a renowned physician in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Carolyn’s death came just days after Todd’s father was rushed to the ICU after taking a fall at home. “We were all congregating in Richmond around the care of my dad and so, understandably, the family energy was around him,” Todd says. “Then a few hours later, my mother passes away completely unexpectedly.”

What followed were some of the hardest days of Todd’s life. But her grief was compounded by something totally avoidable: An error-strewn, likely AI-generated obituary, written without the family’s knowledge, started careening around social media.

For a woman with a story as powerful as Carolyn’s—born in rural Virginia, she grew up an orphan before working her way up the medical ranks—the obituary fell woefully flat. “This obituary didn’t say anything specific at all,” says Todd. “It was just like: ‘She was a doctor, and pediatric patients loved her.’”

It was also full of errors, Todd says, and appeared on a website that was cluttered with cheap ads called Obitsupdate.  “It was incredibly difficult to make all of these arrangements,” says Todd. “And on top of that, we don’t need an unauthorized bullshit AI website making everything harder for us.”

Todd is far from alone in her frustration. AI-generated obits are now filling the web on sites like BNN, The Thaiger, and FreshersLive, marking a new chapter in the quest to monetize grief. Many of these sites churning out AI-generated content, exploiting the dead, are based in Asia and appear to be run solely to generate ad revenue. BNN was operated out of Hong Kong by an Indian-American entrepreneur before it shut its news arm in May 2024; FreshersLive is reportedly run out of Southeast Asia; and The Thaiger is a Thai-based news website that intersperses local news with obituaries about people with no connection to the country. The New York Times reported that BNN, before its closure, hired would-be journalists from countries like Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria to put existing stories, including obituaries, through generative AI tools before posting on its own website, which the Times called a “chop shop.” It’s one of more than 500 unreliable AI-generated websites identified by NewsGuard in October 2023.

The business model is simple: Produce automated content at scale to jump on Google trends and slough off profit. That would have been uneconomical in an era where people had to write the stories. Augmented by generative AI tools, it’s possible. But little do those who publish the AI-generated dross know what impact it has on the people left behind. In early March, Chris Mohney’s father, Paul, passed away in Chattanooga, Tennessee.