November 5, 2024 • 61 mins
We’re back with an update about what’s been going on with Bridget, and exploring a new low for the use of AI.
AI-written obituaries are using technology to compound people’s grief and run roughshod over their privacy: https://www.fastcompany.com/91162990/ai-written-obituaries-are-compounding-peoples-grief
Bridget has had it with digital scammers eating away at our humanity, just so they can make a lousy buck.
She has a very special set of skills.
And this time, it's personal.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Toad and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet Welcome to
There Are No Girls on the Internet, where we explore
the intersection of identity, social media, technology, and the Internet. However,
(00:25):
if this is your first time ever listening to the show,
maybe this is not the episode to start with. I
don't know if this episode is going to be representative
of the UVRA that we have built over the last
four years here that there are No Girls on the Internet. Generally,
the podcast does not really explore sort of like what's
(00:46):
going on personally with me as most listeners.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
No.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
However, I have been gone from the show since July,
and I figured it's time to let you all the
listeners in on some of what's been going on. This
being a tech I swear there is a tech angled
what's been going on with me. But yeah, if this
is your first time listening, Welcome, We're so excited to
have you. This might not be the one to start with.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, I think that's probably good advice for people. It's
gonna be a little different. But Bridgie, it's so nice
to have you back here? Thank you for recording. And
I got to ask, how have things been with you?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
If you watch Bravos Real Housewives of New York, you
know when Derenda is asked like, how are you doing?
Not well? Bitch? That's how I'm doing not well, bitch.
Things have been terrible. Things have been very, very bad
really all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, socially, in
(01:52):
all the ways that one can be bad. I am bad.
I feel like people listening are like, what the hell
is going on out there? Yet it's not been a
good I've not been a good summer and not been
a good fall.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, I know it's been very rough, and I really
commend you for wanting to get back on the mic
talk to listeners about what's been going on with you
and that you know. I know a lot of listeners
have written in with concern and expressing their support, which
was very nice. But so where do you want to start?
Do you want to just take us through chronologically or
(02:26):
something else.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
I'll just jump in. So on the fourth of July,
I'll say, on the fourth of July, I had a
great fourth of July when kayaking celebrated all the stuff
that people do, blah blah blah. The next day I
got a call from my mom saying that my dad
had had a pretty bad fall down the stairs. People
who have been following me for a while, like back
(02:50):
in the stuff I've ever told you days, might recall
that my dad is disabled, has had a whole host
of like chronic health issues. You know, he has had
strokes on the pad. So this was not wholly new
territory for us as a family, but it was still
pretty rough news. He had been on the stairs. My
mom heard a loud crash, came downstairs, he was on
(03:11):
the ground. She called one when one the whole works.
The day after that was my brother and sister in law.
They were having a baby shower in Richmond, Virginia because
they're expecting twins. They since have had these twins, so
there are twin me said nephew out in the world,
which is great. So I came home. I was already
planning on going to see my family to be at
(03:34):
this baby shower. I went to the baby shower. Was
a lovely time. Saw my mom there, my brother there,
all my family there. After the baby shower was winding down,
my mom got in her car to drive to the
hospital to see my dad because he was still hospitalized
from that fall. Maybe an hour later, I excused myself
from the baby shower, also got in my car, drove
(03:57):
to the hospital to meet my mom and my dad.
Met up in my dad's hospital room. You know, my
dad was you know, he was in okay condition, like
was talking alert, you know, had had had some like
medical stuff going on. But like I was happy to
see him and happy to see that he was like
doing I thought, like more or less fun. Spent a
(04:19):
couple of hours visiting with him in the hospital. My
mom also my brother soon thereafter, the baby shower wrapped
up and he met us at the hospital, so the
entire family at the hospital. All in all, it was
like a fairly normal day. And I remember thinking, Wow,
I was so worried about my dad and that fall,
but he actually seems like he's gonna be okay. He
(04:40):
seemed pretty stable and solid. The next day, I go
visit my dad in the hospital. I was surprised that
my mom had not made it, so I'm sort of
like waiting around for her, like where's Mom, Where's Mom?
And I tell my dad that I you know, I'm
just like, oh, I haven't heard from Mom all day.
He's like, that's a new usual. You should have your
(05:01):
brother go check on her. And he did go check
on her, and she had passed away. She died very unexpectedly.
The last time I saw her was we were in
the hospital with my dad and I had walked her
to her car, and I guess I feel sort of
(05:21):
grateful that the last thing I said to her, I
remember the moment like very clearly. It's like very much
burned into my memory that the last moment that she
had with my dad was quite tender, like they hugged
and they kissed and you know, embraced, and that I
walked her to her car, and that our last moment
was tender, like I think I said, I love you,
(05:42):
And I'm grateful that that's what I said, is the
last thing, because I certainly had no idea that it
was going to be the last time that I ever
saw her alive.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
You know, that's obviously he's so so terrible, I think,
to be with your dad in the hospital, you know,
a very concerning fall like he was in the hospital,
and then to lose your mom unexpectedly like two days later.
(06:12):
That's like a level of tragedy that I think many,
if not most people never experienced so like so much,
and so I just wanted to ask for the listener's benefit, like,
was did your mom have a lot of health problems?
Was this like something that was kind of expected or
(06:33):
or was it more out of the blue.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Completely out of the blue. My mom, you know, had
just turned seventy, so which was a big milestone birth
day for her. But in the scheme of things, seventy
is quite young, and so she didn't have like major
health complications. I will say the day, the last day
that we spent together, the day of my brother's baby shower,
was like a just a horribly hot day in Virginia.
(06:59):
It was like triple digits, you know. I was having
difficulty being out and about that day. I remember, notably,
it was like the hottest day of the summer, and
it was so hot that I remember thinking, like, I
wonder if they're going to cancel the baby shower because
it's so hot. Unfortunately, it's a long story, but we
were unable to do an autopsy, so I will never
(07:22):
really know what happened, which you know, was difficult for
me to accept that. But in some ways it doesn't matter.
I guess I've come to sort of that conclusion that
I'm definitely the kind of person who would really like
perseverates that the right word perseverate on the details and
(07:43):
the why and the how and the like could this
have been prevented? And that's definitely like a way that
I cope. And in some ways it's okay that I
I mean, I mean, it has to be okay. I've
had to have made peace with the fact that I'll
never know what happened, and you know that that is
how it has to be. But when I say it
(08:04):
was unexpected, like my mom, she had like a ring camera,
even though you know, we tell how much do I
rail against those? And my mom didn't listen to the show,
so she didn't hear we had to say about ring
So she had one. And the last thing that she
did was that she called to order delivery, like dinner
(08:26):
delivery food. And you know, she calls the order in
on her phone because we now have that. You see
the delivery driver come to her door, knock on the door,
you know, wait around, knock again, wait around. She doesn't answer,
So in between her calling to order food when she
(08:48):
got home after the last night that I saw her
at the hospital. She you know that past and you know,
as horrible as it was, I guess the way that
I'm trying to cope is really look for the bright
sides and the positive because the situation was so horrible
that it's the only thing I can do. And so, yeah,
(09:12):
there are positives. You know that she spent her last
day with her whole family. You know, she did not
appear to have been in any pain, Like it was
not like she had a fall. She was in her
in her favorite chair. Like when we found her at first,
you know, it looked like she was just asleep, so
(09:33):
she wasn't you know, it wasn't like she was like
face down on the floor or something, which is something
that I've sort of been clinging to. But yeah, was
very deeply unexpected. I was in informed of this by
my brother at the hospital. I didn't tell my dad.
I ran out of the hospital one of his nurses, who,
(09:54):
by the way, a theme of this episode might be
like shout out to nurses. Nurses are angels, because every
hero of this story has been a nurse. They'll get
to that later. But yeah, my dad's nurse was like,
oh my god, I like collapsed in the hospital hallway
and she held me and helped me get up and
was like she was like, don't tell your dad, just
go rushed home found her. I don't know if anybody
(10:20):
out there has ever found a loved one dead, but
it sticks with you. I guess I'll just put it
that way. It's very difficult. It's not something I wish on,
I would ever wish on my worst enemy. It's really hard.
It's not something you ever like forget.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, I can't imagine how difficult that must have been.
You know. I think your focus on like trying to
focus on some of those positive things that I mean,
I had no idea, but that seems seems like a
positive thing to think about. And you know, I think
(10:58):
the fact that it sounds like she when quickly without pain,
you know, I think that is something that when I've
had people close to me die often they haven't had that,
and I wish that they had. So I think that
truly is something.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Well spoiler alert, because I get to experience both. I'm special.
I'm that special that if you've ever wondered, like, well,
what I rather have my loved one die unexpectedly without
any pain in her sleep very quickly, or have them
fade away from a disease for which there is no
cure slowly, bit by bit. I got to tell you
(11:40):
both are bad. I'm experiencing both as we speaking. Spoiler
alert for how terrible the last few months have.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, so I definitely want to come back to your
mom because I've had I had the opportunity to meet her.
She was an amazing person and I uh.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
I loved to you, by the way.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Oh so I definitely want to come back to her.
But let's complete the story. So, like, what are you
talking about that you've gotten to experience both well?
Speaker 1 (12:15):
As I mentioned, my dad was in the hospital when
this happened, and when I left his room, I did
not tell him that my mom had died because it
sounds wild to say, but I genuinely did not believe
it. It was not until I saw her that I started
to believe it and believe it or not. Even a
little bit after, I like wasn't sure. I was like,
maybe something will happen. Once she was like in a casket,
(12:38):
I was like, okay, she probably this probably is what's happening,
but like that, but like that is how unexpected this
was to me. So, you know, I went home, was
talking to my family, and we decided that we had
to go back to the hospital the next day and
break the news to my dad. And as hard as
(12:58):
it was for me, my dad had it worse. I
really feel for my dad. So we had to break
the news to him in the hospital that you know,
he'd seen my mom for the last time, and from
there it was like something turned off in him. It
(13:18):
was like and maybe people who have been through something
like this can chime in and let me know, because
apparently it is not uncommon, but it was like a
light somewhere and my dad turned off. And since my
mom passed away, my dad has continued to get worse
and worse. Since that day that he was admitted to
(13:41):
the hospital on the fourth of July. He has not
walked since then. He has been in either a hospital
or a rehab facility, back to hospital, back to rehab,
back to hospital. He has not gone home. He has
not spent a single solitary moment, not in a facility
of some kind since then.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
And so just just to chime in, uh so we're
recording this on November one, and he entered on July fourth,
so that's.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
That's right months. And to give you a sense, like
a week before my dad was hospitalized in July, I
had had lunch with him in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and so
he got into his car, drove himself the hour and
changed away to Fredericksburg, walked into the restaurant. We had
a totally normal you know, no flags were raised. It's
(14:30):
not like so my dad went from like a pretty
independent person who had chronic health challenges, had this fall
and then it was like once once he heard about
my mom, it was yeah, I just the only I
can describe it as like something turned off in him.
And so he has continued to get worse and worse
(14:54):
and worse. He is currently hospitalized. I have really spent
most of my time since July with him. It's just yeah,
it's just been hard. So like I'm still very much
in this and you know, my mom has passed away.
My dad is not doing well. I have been living
(15:17):
in kind of various hotels and Arabian bees in Virginia
to be with him. Shout out to an amazing nonprofit
in Richmond. Virginia called Doorways because they provide low cost,
accessible housing that is near where my dad is hospitalized.
If not for them, I don't I don't know what
(15:37):
I would do. Like I've I've spent all my money
trying to be in Richmond to be with him because
he can't walk, can't really speak, needs someone to be
advocating for him, and that person is me. And so yeah,
it's been that's really been my life for the last
few months. But I do want to back up because
(16:02):
I said that this story had a tech angle, and
I meant it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah, that's right, you said there was that tech angle.
So and again I want to get to hearing about
your mom. But what is the what's the tech angle
in this story?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Well, so the day that my mom passed away was
July seventh. That was the day that we found her
less than twelve hours later. Imagine my surprise when an
obituary is published and goes semi viral on social media
(16:41):
about my mom. Now you might be asking, oh, did
someone in your family write this obituary like very early
on and submit it. That's what we thought, right, And
it makes sense that you would be thinking that, But
that is not what happened, So less than twelve hours
after we found my mom's dead body in her house,
before we had ever even informed my own father, Coamma,
(17:06):
her husband, Kamma, her next of kin of her death.
Imagine my surprise when a scammy AI obituary, pirate, piece
of shit media, whatever you want to call it, website
publishes a badly written, hacky, full of errors, full of
(17:27):
insidious ads obituary for my mom. This was before we
had a chance to go to the hospital to talk
to my dad. This was before we had informed the
entirety of our family. This was truly even before I
had really like internalized what had happened, This had already
gone viral on Facebook. Now I should say I would
(17:50):
call my mom kind of a local celebrity in our town.
My mom was a really respected and distinguished pediatrician, and basically,
if you were like a black person in Richmond, she
was probably your pediatrician, or you knew somebody who she
was their doctor. She has been in private practice for decades,
(18:11):
and so generations and generations and generations of people have
been treated by her. I would say that she's kind
of a town hero. Like when I would go out
to dinner with her, go to the mall with her. People.
I'm not kidding. And this is not just like the
rosy sheen that I'm putting on her because she was
my mom. This is like, like I mean this literally,
(18:33):
people would run out of shops to hug her for
saving their lives. I've seen this happen multiple times on
multiple different outings. People have run from inside shops to
hug her and say, you saved my daughter's life, you
saved my son's life, you saved my sister's life. Right,
So my mom was she a public figure, and I
think it's a little debatable. However, she was somebody that
(18:55):
had a profile in my town. I'll put it that way.
And so here's what I think happened. From the technical side. So,
my mom was a doctor who was like known for
never canceling appointments. She loved what she did. She was
a really hard worker. I think that when waves and
waves of appointments started getting canceled, rumors start flying that
(19:18):
something has happened to her. Because the demographic that she
serves in Richmond is also a demographic that is like
heavy on Facebook. If you searched my mom's name on Facebook.
It is like thousands and thousands and thousands of people
who are being like, what's going on with with my mom?
What's going on with her? What's going on with her?
You know? Is she alive? Is she okay? I've done
a lot of looking into this. Here's what I think
(19:40):
is going on. From a technical standpoint, I think that
people who are running scammy AI obituary shops online are
clogging it when someone's name is enjoying a boost from search,
when people are searching for someone's name a lot, when
people are using someone's name a lot on social media,
(20:00):
and that's how they determine we're going to cook up
an AI generated obituary for this person. And that is
exactly what they did. So I'm not kidding. I knew
she was gone for less than twelve hours when this
piece was published, and when it was published, it went
wildly viral on Facebook, to the point where people that
I had not spoken to in years, people I certainly
(20:22):
didn't tell what was going on, were texting me sending
me the link to the obituary being like, oh my god,
I heard about your mom. I'm so sorry, right, and
so mind you we hadn't talked to my dad yet.
I mean, I guess, like depending on how you look
at it. Luckily, my dad was not in a position
where he could be scrolling his phone. Had my dad
had his phone, he absolutely would have heard the news
(20:43):
about the death of his wife from Facebook. There's no
way that he would not have. The saving grace is
that my dad, in his state, was not able to
have his phone and be looking at his phone. Had
he had access to his phone, that is how he
would have found out about his wife passing away, not
from his kids, not from his family. I have to
pause there because, like, even talking about it now, it
(21:04):
makes me want to vomit. It like it fills me
with such rage and disgust for my fellow human that
it makes me I mean, you know, give report on
tech harms for four years and then they happen to you,
and you can't believe that the depravity and the depths
that people will go for to generate a quick buck online.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, it's truly despicable. I think there are a lot
of different perspectives in society. People have different values, but
I think one thing that pretty much every human I've
ever met, like has in common is that everybody recognizes
that when you lose a close member of your family,
that's hard and there should be some respect given. And
(21:50):
uh to take that kind of event and just turn
it into more seo chum to drive clicks or whatever
the scam was to monetize this event that to you
was like one of the most difficult things you've ever
been through, and to them is just like another data
(22:10):
point to monetize. It really is despicable and highlights like
the worst of the ways that technology can harm us.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
This was the worst day of my life was the
day that I found my mom's dead body in her house.
Every day since then has been a living nightmare from
which there is no waking up. And I will not
rest until the people who have monetized this day of
mine lose everything. This is like it's fucking war with me.
(22:43):
I will never be over this. It will be I will.
I will go to my grave shaming these people and
talking about this and speaking about this. So this is
not over by a long shot. I have some names,
so one of us you'll hear later on. But yeah,
I'm coming for all of you people, So I hope
you're fucking ready let's take a quick break at her back.
(23:21):
So you said you wanted to circle back to talking
about my mom, So let's do that because anybody who
knew my mom, met my mom, ever experienced my mom,
will tell you that she was a force. Like Again,
this is not me saying this because I'm her daughter,
although I do have a special affinity for her obviously,
But my mom was born into abject poverty in rural Virginia.
(23:46):
As an orphan. She worked in farms. You know, it's
just like a farm hand, bounced from family to family
and foster care working on farms in rural Virginia. She
was born with nothing. She worked her way up, was
at the top of her school in college, top of
her classes in med school, became probably the top rated
(24:09):
pediatrician in our town. Right the day that she died.
The week after that, the whole family was meant to
be going to Virginia Beach to watch her get a
massive award for pediatrics. Right, my mom has been on
National Spotlight, She's been on the Today Show talking about
the work that she's done for childhood literacy. She is
(24:30):
an amazing person who has had a dynamic and multifaceted
life story. Anybody who has met her could tell you
what a colorful person she was, What a smart person
she was, What a funny person she was, What a
warm person, what she was, What a passionate person she was,
(24:52):
What an a pitiated person she was? Like she was
a person who lived in full color. Right. The thing
that pisses me off the mo about this AI obituary
that they published about her is that it's so generic
and so flat. They say, oh, she was a pediatrician
who was specialized in children's medicine. Well, what the fuck
(25:13):
else would a pediatrician specialize in. That's like saying, oh,
he was a firefighter who specialized in flames. Obviously she
specialized in children's medicine. The way that it's written, it's
just the most AI generated, flat piece of bullshit I
have ever read in my life, And it is so
deeply offensive to me. If a human was sitting down
to write an obituary about my mom, there are so
(25:34):
many things that you obviously would have included. The first
obituary that was published, because there was a handful of them,
did not include one single detail. It was all vagaries.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah, and you know, I know we have a lot
of younger listeners who maybe have not yet had the
experience of having a close loved one die. And to you,
I say, congratulations. Keep writing that wave as long as
you can, but it is coming, and when it does,
you will realize that obituaries are important. I don't know.
(26:08):
I personally didn't really think much of them until my
grandparents passed a few years ago and I was very
close with them. I personally wrote their obituaries and it
was a really meaningful thing for me, and I think
something meaningful for my family, and it just really like,
it means a lot to have an obituary that does
(26:30):
reflect who the person was in their life, and yet
the sting of having that taken away, it would make
my blood boil.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Oh, my blood is boiling, my friend, my blood is boiling.
And it is even worse that I am not alone.
So it turns out that this kind of practice is
actually commonplace, and it's been going on for a while.
It has been made worse by the proliferation of AI.
Funeral homes have actually been fighting oh bitch, wear a scam,
(27:00):
obituary pirates whatever you want to call it, for fifteen
twenty years, but it's really taken off with technology. I
actually was interviewed for an article in Fast Company after
this happened. The article I'll link it in the show notes,
but it's like almost difficult for me to read because
when I was interviewed, I was still very much I mean,
(27:22):
I'm still in the thick of it now, but I
was like really in the thick of it then. And
in the interview, I feel like I come off as
like unwell, and I was unwell, like I really was,
you know, I had just buried my mom. I had
and this was totally unexpected. I was literally sleeping in
(27:44):
my dad's I see you room for a month, so
like his room has a couch in it, I was
just curling up on my couch and that's where I
was living for a literal month. I was dealing with
all of his health stuff, talking to doctors every day,
trying to figure out how to you know, you know,
my mom died unexpectedly, so trying to figure out all
of her like a state stuff, her will, like all
(28:06):
of this like incredibly complicated stuff, funeral arrangements, stuff that
we had never talked about, which we'll get into that
in a minute. But I was just struggling. I was
I was on well. So it's almost hard for me
to go back and read that article because I'm like,
oh my god, like I was really in it. But yeah,
when someone is going through one of the most difficult times.
(28:27):
For me, it wasn't just one of the most it
was the most difficult time of my entire life. Having
there be obituary pirates who are capitalizing off of that,
and adding to that, I wanted to die. It just
was really hard. And you know what made it worse
was that the AI generated obituaries hit the Internet very
(28:48):
quickly and went viral on Facebook very quickly. And so
when our family actually submitted a real obituary written by
my aunt Ruth, who did a beautiful job, when that
was submitted to the funeral home and put on line
for a while, the AI generated obituary still had more reach.
Like when you googled my mom's name plus obituary, the
(29:08):
ones that were written by her family with actual information,
not to mention, you know, no inaccuracies. Because the AI
generated ones had inaccuracies, those were not as high up
on Google for a time as the ones that were bullshit,
and so you know, you were talking about how obituaries matter.
They matter for so many reasons, not the least of
which is, you know, the obituary written by our family
(29:32):
had information about the services, information about how you could
connect with the family. I go on to these, you know,
AI scammy sites, and there are real people who my
mom actually knew leaving condolences. They don't know that that
has nothing. Our family didn't authorize that, they didn't put
that up right. And so that's just a logistical reason
as to why these are so messed up. But you're right,
(29:56):
obituaries matter. Obituaries it it matters when someone passes away.
The act of writing an obituary is important, and you know,
you write them for other people. You write them for humans.
You don't write them to generate money. And you don't
(30:16):
take away someone's right to mourn their mother the way
that they want to do it. You don't take that
away from them. That was stolen from me. Other than
my close family and like my close close circle of friends,
I didn't tell anybody my mom passed away, and they
all knew. They all knew from that AI bullshit. I
(30:37):
can't even express what that feels like like I feel
like I was robbed of the opportunity to mourn my
mother on my own terms. Grieving is hard enough, having
to grieve in this digital fish bowl is just I
can't even describe what that felt like. I'm still I'm
still not over it. Maybe I'll never be over it.
And you know, I just distinctly remember having this moment
(31:01):
maybe an hour after my family met at my dad's
hospital room to tell him that my mom had died,
where it was me, my brother, my sister in law,
my aunts, my mom's sisters, and somebody had sent one
of the AI generated obituaries to my aunt, and we
all had this moment where we were like who published this,
who submitted this? And I don't want to say we
(31:24):
were like accusing each other, but it was a tense moment.
It was a moment of like, who in this very
close circle of like friends and family went to the
media and come to find out, none of us did.
That was just just a thing that was taken from
us by scammers. And so yeah, that was a moment
(31:47):
on top of the worst moment of my life that
we didn't need as a family. We already had enough
on our plates as a family, and yeah, the fact
that this is a common practice is just unacceptable. Here's
a here, there's a bit from the Fast Company article
that I was quoted in. I didn't say this, but
this was what the journalist wrote. AI generated obits are
(32:08):
now filling the web, marking a new chapter in the
quest to monetize grief. Many of these sites turning out
AI generated content exploiting the dead are based in Asia
and appear to be run solely to generate ad revenue.
As I said, my mom was a bit of a
I don't know, I'm a call of a celebrity, but
like she was like a known entity in our town. However,
(32:31):
Fast Company also spoke to people who didn't have any
kind of public profile, for whom these scammy rags still
published AI obituaries for. In some cases, the person is
not even really dead. A journalist wrote a piece about
the anxiety that she experiences while driving on LA's freeways,
and she told CNN that she believes that the spike
in online traffic attached to her name from that piece
(32:54):
being published is why scammers decided to say that she
died on the internet. Their hope is that that little
spike in traffic attached to her name means that more
people will click on that obituary, which will lead to
monetary revenue for whoever's putting that up. But she wasn't dead.
In fact, she was sitting in a hospital room helping
a friend through surgery when her phone started blowing up
(33:15):
because these videos of AI generated news anchors were talking
about how she died in a car crash. She said,
I was sad. Reading your own obituary is a surreal experience.
After speaking with experts, I was scared for myself, for
all journalists, and for our society. And yeah, I'm also scared. Yeah,
(33:36):
it is scary. You know.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
One of the things that you mentioned, that was talked
about in some of those articles that you shared ahead
of this recording was the idea that these obituary pirates
have been doing this for twenty years, maybe a little
bit longer, and so it does seem like a good
example of the sort of harm that has been ongoing,
(34:01):
the sort of tech enabled harm that has really been
like turbocharged with AI to allow them to churn these
out so much faster and more cheaply.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Exactly, but even the ones that are not necessarily AI
generated are still pretty creepy. Kate nibs Over at Wired
reported on how YouTubers are modifying this practice by just
summarizing obituaries of dead strangers in videos. Somebody was upset
enough by this after watching strangers make videos hastily summarizing
(34:34):
a good friend's death that they reached out to her,
she writes. Sometimes these obituary YouTubers promote products in the
video description, like a two hundred and twenty five dollars
vitamin sea cream for sale on Amazon. Sometimes they just
list strings of SEO, baiting keywords like death, cause of death, die, rip,
what happened? While each channel differs from the next in
small ways, there's a unifying aesthetic. Everything looks rushed and careless.
(34:57):
There's no hint of emotion or acknowledgment that they're discussing
someone's greatest tragedy. And as you said, Mike, this is
not new. Funeral homes have been dealing with obituary aggravator
sites for fifteen or twenty years. This is from Courtney Miller,
chief strategy officer at MkJ Marketing, who specializes in funeral services.
She says that the site's trall news articles and local
(35:18):
funeral home websites looking for an initial death announcement that
has basic details like name, age, and where a service
might be held. They then scrape and republish that content
at scale using templated formats or today increasingly AI tools.
So basically these people are just exploiting SEO and like
Google trends and things like that. SEO expert Chris silver
(35:39):
Smith says there's a whole new strategy in search rankings,
and I believe it's based off of getting information that
someone has died and seeing there's a little spike in
traffic perhaps in a specific region for that person's name,
and rapidly optimizing and publishing articles about the person to
get these dribbles of search traffic.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Dribbles of search traffic is such a like diminutive term,
but that feels correct here, Like it's hard to imagine
that they're making any sort of serious money off any
individual obituary, And I guess it's really like the scale
of it that allows this to be a fruitful enterprise
(36:19):
for these scammers to take people's lives and flatten them
down in this way, to almost like turn people's death
into a commodity, Like what is the business model there
is it that Well.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
It's pretty much exactly that. They just start playing on
the surge of interest in keywords related to death s'suck
my mom's name, and they just pump out low effort
content to try to capitalize on that flow of web traffic.
It's really a numbers game, and I think that's why
it kind of like has to be so low effort,
because I don't think that anybody was making a lot
(36:52):
of money individually from my mom's AIBS obituary. But if
you do it for enough people, if you crank them out,
crank them out, and crank them out in aggregate, you
can probably make some money. And obituaries really are big business.
A Wired piece called the Morbid War over online Obituaries
from twenty twenty one describes this company, Echovita. These people
(37:15):
are basically a ring of obituary scammers. So companies like
Echovita they take this scam a step further. So Echovita
was sued by Service Corporation International, which is like a
conglamorate of fifteen hundred funeral homes, and they alleged that
the company was scraping details from obituaries written by family
members from funeral home websites and just republishing them. Quote.
(37:39):
Mining people's personal data at the lowest point in their
lives is disappointing. A spokesperson for the Funeral Conglamorate told
Wired in an email. So Echovita makes money through purporting
to connect mourners with flower delivery services or other like
funeral services that they then profit from. But wait, I'm sorry.
Did I give these fucking goals permission to profit financially
(38:02):
from my mom's death? No? I fucking didn't. I've never
talked to these people. I don't know these people, and
yet when I searched their scam enterprise website, what you know,
there's my mom's name, there's my mom's information next to
these like insidious scammy pop up ads that are like, oh,
for thirty dollars, you can plant a tree in honor
(38:25):
of my mom. Also side note, my mom would have
hated that. She would have thought that was so hacky.
She would have never approved that. I didn't approve that,
yet on their website, these guls are making money off
of my dead mother without anybody in my family's permission.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
So terrible and like big money, Like you said.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Right, So, according to a piece about another lawsuit against Ecuovida,
the company has an option for people to claim an
obituary right. So I could provide documentation to Echovida proving
that my mom is my mom at If I did that,
I could then take a cut of whatever profit they
make from flowers, in candles or whatever else. But I'm sorry,
(39:08):
that is just gross. Why should I have to prove
to you that I am my mother's daughter. You a
stranger that I have not provided to have anything to
do with me or my family. Why do I need
to provide documentation to you to prove anything? Who gave
you permission to have my mom's name on your scam website?
Speaker 2 (39:27):
And how generous of them to give you some undefined
cut of their choschke sales.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I'm not even sure that people would actually get the
flowers or the tree is actually planted, because, according to
the trust Pilot reviews and EcoVida, the flowers that people
are sending the money to buy might not even show up,
and the company is just like pocketing the money. Here's
one review from trust Pilot quote, these are leech companies
that take obituaries from legitimate funeral home site and post
(39:55):
them on their own sites to profit from The obituary
is often inaccurate. They are just trying to sell try,
et cetera without permission or authorization from their families. They
just did this to us on the loss of my
fourteen year old grandson. Our funeral director has made several
attempts to stop this, but always hits a dead end.
I have warned everyone we shared our obituary with, and
I am writing a letter to the Secretary of State.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
It's kind of surprising that they are still doing this
with impunity, given stories like that from a grandmother who
sounds like she's pretty mad. Listening to you sounds like
you're pretty mad. I wouldn't want to be the focus
of that.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
Ire Oh Ethovida CEO, Paco Laclerk, your name is going
to be on my lips and on my fingers for
the rest of both of our lives. I'm going to
be on your ass like white on Rice. You will
never shake me. My family is own an apology. I
am getting that apology, rest assured. Also, fun fact about
(40:52):
Ecovita is like, I mean, you know, Mike, you know
I love reading when there's like a review site and
somebody leaves a bad review, owner comes on to be like,
that's not true. You did get those chicken fingers blah.
If you go on to the trust pilot reviews for Echovida,
somebody I assume it's Echovida ceo Paco la Clerk is
(41:13):
arguing back with everybody. So because if all of these
people being like, these people are scammers, they are trying
to profit off the death of my child, These people
are ghouls, And then you have the owner or somebody
replying to each of you being like, that's not true.
We're a legitimate business. You're lying. If you find yourself
arguing back with dozens of people who are who are
(41:34):
accusing you angrily of scamming and making money from their
dead family members, give it up, Like, at what point
are you? At what point did you take a step
back and be like, am I the ghoul? Here? Am
I the one and the wrong here? Like, once you're
arguing with multiple people who are grieving, the asshole is
you Pacoh? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:52):
That does seem like it should be a pretty clear
signal that like maybe one needs to take a look
at what they are doing. If they are are engaged
in lots of online disputes with grieving family members.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Correct, So let's talk more about our friend. Pascal Paco,
la Clerk, owner of Echo Vita so Lecourt, claims that
his company their mission is virtuous. He's just informing the
public of recent deaths at the public service. He says
that anybody can publish obituaries on his website for free
and says quote, in reality, the funeral home should never
(42:26):
be the owner of an obituary. The obituary's purpose is
to share information with the public. So in my case,
is it Paco's job to inform my ill father of
the unexpected death of his wife of forty years. Is
it Paco's job or is it his family's job? Because
(42:47):
I feel like my dad doesn't even know who Paco
fucking is and he needs to stay out of it.
This idea that he is doing a virtuous public service
and that the public has a right to know when
someone passes. If you've ever had the misfortune of having
to bury a loved one, especially unexpectedly, it is very
difficult and it is nobody's business but the family and
(43:09):
the grieving person to decide how and when that information
is distributed. What is this idea that when somebody dies automatically,
the entire public has to be informed. Like I'm telling you,
it is such a callous way of robbing the grieving
from what should be an intimate process that they can
(43:31):
work out on their own as a family. Nobody has
the right to swoop in and inform the public before
the family is even ready to do that, and they
certainly shouldn't be doing it to make a quick buck.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Like Pascal Paco Laclerk is truly detestable.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Yeah, he's a real piece of shit. More after a
quick break, let's get right back into it. So you
might be wondering how did Egovida come to be? Well,
(44:09):
before Echovida, there was a company called Afterlife that was
shuddered after a ruling, a twenty million dollar ruling against
them for pirating the obituaries and pictures of dead people
in order to profit from grieving families. I have to
say the judge in this case, Federal Court Judge Catherine Kine,
really laid down the law, and she said that the
(44:30):
reason she was being so intense was because she thought
that their behavior was high handed, reprehensible, and marked a
departure from standards of decency, and so she was like,
I need to like make an example of them so
they will never never do this again. Get a load
of this quote that Paco gave to The Globe after
the judge's ruling on Afterlives. So Afterlives, unlike Echovida, Echovida
(44:52):
at least uses Ai to kind of Frankenstein the obituaries
just enough so they sound a little bit different. So
it's like not totally just explicitly copy and pasting. After
Lives was just that touching obituary that you wrote for
your grandfather, Mike, They would just a copy paste on that.
Bad boy, steal a picture of your grandfather from your Facebook,
(45:14):
put it up there, add a link to buy a
tree that maybe between you and me nobody would ever get,
pocket the money and fucking profit, and then bounce to
the next one.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
How would you feel about that, Well, sir, I wouldn't
like it.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
No, So it might not surprise you to find that
that is against the law. But after that twenty million
dollar ruling which shuddered Afterlife, this is the quote that
our friend Paco stand up Guy, gave to the Globe.
Quote the day we heard that publishing obituaries on the
Internet similar to that of newspapers, and using photos and
(45:48):
original text was unacceptable. We immediately stopped operating the company. Homie,
why would you think that stealing the photos of dead
strangers is an acceptable way to make money in the
first place.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
And then he went on to start this other company
that does the same thing but a little bit different
so that it can avoid copyright infringement.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Right, yes, yes, exactly that. And so the new company, EcoVida,
it is big business. Paco says that he this company
has generated five million dollars in revenue off of people's
obituaries in twenty twenty alone. Much like Afterlives, the company
that was shuttered after that twenty million dollar ruling, Ecovita
takes commissions on flowers, candles, and tree sales. The only
(46:30):
difference is he's not republishing or stealing the obituaries verbatim
and pictures of dead people. He's sort of pulling information
from other obituaries, so there's a little bit of grayl
area and then profiting off of them. But still oftentimes
those obituaries are incorrect or have incomplete information.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Going back to the AI generated obituary about your mom.
It was shocking how they could cram so little information
into so many words. It just really was like so vague.
As a little experiment, I asked chat gpt to write
me a five hundred word obituary for a beloved pediatrician
(47:11):
from Richmond, and it was almost identical that flattening that
you talked about. I think, you know, this phenomenon does
highlight a lot of the tech stuff that we've talked
about for years, and I think one of them is
how technology has this tendency to just flatten us, and,
like you said, for these obituaries, just harvest what's available,
(47:32):
make up what isn't, and then just churn out some
chum exactly.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
One of the people also interviewed for that Fast Company
article talked about losing his father and his father had
been a service member, and in the AI generated version
of his dad's obituary, it is this like like they
made up awards that he never won. They made him
a more decorated veteran than he was, and he was like,
my dad was a great guy. But I can see
(47:57):
where the AI tried to like jazz up this story,
and I guess it sort of goes back to what
you were saying is that obituaries are for humans. They're
for the living to grieve people that we loved. They
are a record for how we lived, who we were,
how we loved, who loved us, who knew us. Writing
(48:19):
an obituary for somebody is an intimate, special act. It
is adding to the public record of who they were.
I don't want to live in a world where it's
just another way for a tech douche to make money.
I don't want to live in a world where my
mom's beautiful, colorful, full, dynamic, crazy life is just flattened
(48:45):
out so people like Paco La Clerk can get a
nickel in their bank account. That is not the world
I want to live in. Grieving and death is hard enough.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Absolutely, Like that judge said, who you read from it
violates basic ideas of decency. Somebody ought to do something.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Yeah, well, Paco la Clerk says, quote, I want to
use technology to become a disruptor of the industry, meeting
the funeral industry. Paco la Clerk, I don't know you,
we have never met. I don't want my mom's death
and my grieving process to be a pit stop on
your disruption of the funeral industry. I don't give a
(49:26):
fuck about your disruption. You have no right to be
exploiting grieving people using technology. This is what kills me
about this person is that the way that he speaks
in these interviews, I would almost respect it more if
he was like, yeah, I'm a scammer. It's a scam.
It's if I do it enough times, I make a
quick buck. That's why I'm doing it. It's a financial scam.
(49:48):
At least I would be like, Okay, he's being honest.
The thing that kills me is that, because it has
to do with technology, he wants to exploit my dead
mom and my family for money and also be seen
as a titan of industry for doing it. He wants
to be seen as a thought leader for doing it.
He is a scammer. If I took a picture of
(50:09):
Pacola Clerk's dead family member and screen printed it on
a T shirt and started selling it down on Fourteenth Street,
you will call me a scammer. Right, that's a scam
If I did that with that his permission. Because it
involves technology, he believes that it is some kind of
a disruption, as opposed to what it is which is
a violation. And I refuse to live in a world
(50:29):
where somebody can exploit me and my mom and my
family for money for their financial gain against my will,
without my permission, and also have the gall to see
himself as a goddamn visionary not on my watch. So again,
this is not gonna be the last time we talked
about Pacola, Clerk, Paco. Look, Clerk, I am your new
biggest fan. We're going to talk about you every fucking week. Uh,
(50:52):
get used.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
To it, all right, bridget So how do you want
to land this plane? Do you want to circle back
to your mom, you want to talk about your dad,
You want to share what you've learned about going through
this process that might help listeners who are either going
through it or maybe aren't going through it yet but
(51:13):
see it coming down the pike.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
Oh my god, what can I say? I would say
everybody listening to this, if you have parents in your life,
loved ones, older folks. My mom died unexpectedly and none
of her affairs were in order, I'll put it that way,
and it's made everything much harder. And yeah, I would say,
(51:38):
if you are avoiding a tough conversation with your mom
or your dad or your aunt about what their end
of life plans look like. Have the conversation, because you're
going to be dealing with it one way or the other.
One route is it's gonna be hard regardless. So you
got to decide if you want to have that conversation
and get affairs an order now and have it be
(51:59):
regular hard or hard hard. So that's one. So end
of life care plans, whatever needs to be arranged. I
really implore people to make those arrangements while you can,
because it's very difficult to make them otherwise. Take it
from me. Yeah, I would also say, like I am
still very much in it. If I sound not like myself,
(52:23):
it's because I am not myself and I don't know
if myself is ever coming back. This might be a
permanent change for me. And yeah, it's just as hard
as everything was. I think the feeling of having my
grief be exploited, Like I don't think I ever really
(52:46):
got to privately grieve my mom and grieve my dad,
to be honest with you, and like really sort of
grieve what happened to my family. There's been a real
lack of intimacy. I can't quite describe the feeling of
being in like a digital fish bowl while you're going
through something as hard and intimate as grief. It was
(53:07):
really invasive. I have to say, like I really kind
of shut down, you know, when those AI obituaries hit
social media. I was not yet ready to talk about
what was happening, and I had to talk about it
because people were texting me about it and asking me
about it because of these obituaries and so like, I
didn't even want to post my own kind of private
(53:30):
tribute to my mom because of all of this. I like,
I really still haven't because the time that I would
have done that, I was dealing with this, right I
was like trying to find where these plate, where these
AI obituary pirates were based, and trying to get things
taken down off of the Internet and all of that. Right,
(53:52):
so I felt very exposed and it was very hard.
I am still very much in it. So this is
not the sort of like ending of like and now
everything's okay. Everything is terrible for me and I don't
know when it's going to get better. But I would
say the thing that I have learned from all of
this is that when we talk about things like AI.
(54:14):
It really does matter, right, like obituaries matter. Some things
are for humans, some things are There are things that
connect us to our humanity, there are things that connect
us to the experience of being human. All of us
is going to die. I'm so sorry to say this,
but everyone listening right now, if you have not already,
(54:34):
you are going to be burying a parent or someone
that you know and love. And that is a universal
that is something that connects us and makes us all human.
And so we got to decide whether this, this thing
that connects us to our humanity, is a thing that
we are going to allow tech companies and tech leaders
to exploit to make money for themselves against our will.
(54:55):
And I think that this is I am. I am.
If I have ever put a a line in the sand,
I am doing it now. We have to fight this.
Nobody wants to live in a world where when you
lose somebody this is acceptable, let alone commonplace. I will
not stand for it. I don't think any of us
should stand for this. Nobody deserves to live in that world.
That is not a world that I want to live in.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
All right, All right, well, so are we going to
be back here again next week to talk about. Uh,
let's see what's up next on the agenda. Poco Laclerk.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
I'll say this, Pascal, Paco Laclerk, get in touch with me.
I want to hear from you. I want to talk
to you. I know I'm going to be on your
radar soon. However, if you come to me, we can
deal with this. I'd have you on the show. We
can talk whatever you want to do, but this is
sort of your window. I'm going to be a problem
(55:50):
for you. Mark my words. If anybody knows him, you
can send him this episode. I'm going to be a
problem for you one way or another. Make it easy
for yourself by getting in touch with me. I'll just
leave it there.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
So, yeah, Bridget, thanks for coming and recording this. I
know listeners will I don't want to say be happy
to hear from you, given the subject matter, but listeners
have been asking, and so it's and I know it
was difficult, but I do really hope that I don't know,
recording this episode maybe helps you start to feel a
(56:23):
little bit normal. You know, you mentioned that you don't
know if you're ever coming back, and you know we're
always changing all the time, and something like this I'm
sure would profoundly change a person. But you'll get through it,
and I hope that you know, we can all get
through it together. And I know you're not planning. We're
(56:46):
not coming back into regular production right now, but hopefully,
hopefully we'll get back there when you're ready.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
Yeah, thanks for going on this journey with me, Mike.
Speaker 2 (56:57):
My mom loved you, and there were so many things
about your mom. I maybe got to know like one
percent of things about your mom. But the first time
that we met, you know, this is the public health
nerd in me. We talked about childhood let exposure because
that is some research that I did while I was
in grad school. And it turned out that throughout her
(57:19):
career she had worked with the State of Virginia or
the Virginia Department of Public Health to really advocate for
and get enacted a set of programs to reduce the
prevalence of childhood let exposure for kids in the state
of Virginia, which is so important. And you know, I'm
(57:42):
sure that that made a huge difference in the lives
of hundreds of thousands of children. So, you know, just
just one little detail of this amazing woman and I
really feel grateful that I got to meet her.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
I thought you were going to tell the egg story. So,
like Mike notes, I love eggs. I'm obsessed with eggs,
and my mom also really loved eggs. And we go
to dinner, so it's like I think it was just
was it you? Me and her. We were at dinner
and she ordered like ten plates of devils.
Speaker 2 (58:15):
They were good, and she just kept ordering more plates
of deviled eggs and we kept eating them, so like
eating them, just kept eating eggs.
Speaker 1 (58:23):
I was in heaven and I didn't think anything was
weird because I love eggs and I know my mom
loves eggs, So like, had you not said something going
to be I was like, what do you mean it's
not normal to eat twelve deviled eggs in a city? God,
I'm also was really, I I don't want that will
be here. If it's just like a free for all
with me telling stories of my mom, I could. I
could do it for my dad too. But like she
(58:44):
really was like a great person. She had a great laugh.
There was God, I would kill to hear my mom's
laugh again, Like it was like music. She had a
really and she was easy to laugh that was My
favorite quality about my mom is that she was really smiley,
easy to laugh. It's something I aspire to and I
hope it's something that I carrie in her and she
(59:07):
The other thing about her is that she loved her granddaughter.
It is such a tragedy that she did not get
to meet her newest grandkids because my brother and his
wife had twins, so there's two new ones out there.
But she had a really special relationship with my niece
and she spent a lot of time with her, and
(59:28):
my niece will will laugh in a way that my
mom did. That kind of gets me. I see a
lot of my mom in my niece and she's only four,
but she'll say things or she'll laugh in a kind
of way, and I really it's like almost scary how
I can see my mom shining through my niece. And
I hope she I know, I hope she haunts me.
(59:50):
I just like would do anything to just talk to her,
like one more time. So yeah, like I know, people
have all different kinds of relationships with their family, but
you know, it's hard. It's very hard to lose them.
(01:00:11):
And whether you lose them because they pass away or
you lose them because they're not in your life for
another reason, or whether you lose them because they're like
my dad dealing with dementia and you've kind of lost
them even though they're still here. It's just so hard.
So yeah, I hate to end it on a bummer,
but this is what it means to be a human
(01:00:35):
and everybody has to go through this. I'm not the
first person to go through this. People listening will all
go through this in some capacity. And you know, as
hard as it is, we don't have to tolerate it
being made harder in these ways that pull us apart
from who we are as humans, Like this is human,
this is greef. It's ugly, it's horrible, it's messy already.
(01:00:58):
It doesn't also have to be a way that we
get exploited. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech,
or just want to say hi? You can read us
at Hello at tangody dot com. You can also find
transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are
No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Todd.
(01:01:19):
It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed. Creative Jonathan Strickland
is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and
sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host,
Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate
and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Toad and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet Welcome to
There Are No Girls on the Internet, where we explore
the intersection of identity, social media, technology, and the Internet. However,
(00:25):
if this is your first time ever listening to the show,
maybe this is not the episode to start with. I
don't know if this episode is going to be representative
of the UVRA that we have built over the last
four years here that there are No Girls on the Internet. Generally,
the podcast does not really explore sort of like what's
(00:46):
going on personally with me as most listeners.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
No.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
However, I have been gone from the show since July,
and I figured it's time to let you all the
listeners in on some of what's been going on. This
being a tech I swear there is a tech angled
what's been going on with me. But yeah, if this
is your first time listening, Welcome, We're so excited to
have you. This might not be the one to start with.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, I think that's probably good advice for people. It's
gonna be a little different. But Bridgie, it's so nice
to have you back here? Thank you for recording. And
I got to ask, how have things been with you?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
If you watch Bravos Real Housewives of New York, you
know when Derenda is asked like, how are you doing?
Not well? Bitch? That's how I'm doing not well, bitch.
Things have been terrible. Things have been very, very bad
really all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, socially, in
(01:52):
all the ways that one can be bad. I am bad.
I feel like people listening are like, what the hell
is going on out there? Yet it's not been a
good I've not been a good summer and not been
a good fall.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, I know it's been very rough, and I really
commend you for wanting to get back on the mic
talk to listeners about what's been going on with you
and that you know. I know a lot of listeners
have written in with concern and expressing their support, which
was very nice. But so where do you want to start?
Do you want to just take us through chronologically or
(02:26):
something else.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
I'll just jump in. So on the fourth of July,
I'll say, on the fourth of July, I had a
great fourth of July when kayaking celebrated all the stuff
that people do, blah blah blah. The next day I
got a call from my mom saying that my dad
had had a pretty bad fall down the stairs. People
who have been following me for a while, like back
(02:50):
in the stuff I've ever told you days, might recall
that my dad is disabled, has had a whole host
of like chronic health issues. You know, he has had
strokes on the pad. So this was not wholly new
territory for us as a family, but it was still
pretty rough news. He had been on the stairs. My
mom heard a loud crash, came downstairs, he was on
(03:11):
the ground. She called one when one the whole works.
The day after that was my brother and sister in law.
They were having a baby shower in Richmond, Virginia because
they're expecting twins. They since have had these twins, so
there are twin me said nephew out in the world,
which is great. So I came home. I was already
planning on going to see my family to be at
(03:34):
this baby shower. I went to the baby shower. Was
a lovely time. Saw my mom there, my brother there,
all my family there. After the baby shower was winding down,
my mom got in her car to drive to the
hospital to see my dad because he was still hospitalized
from that fall. Maybe an hour later, I excused myself
from the baby shower, also got in my car, drove
(03:57):
to the hospital to meet my mom and my dad.
Met up in my dad's hospital room. You know, my
dad was you know, he was in okay condition, like
was talking alert, you know, had had had some like
medical stuff going on. But like I was happy to
see him and happy to see that he was like
doing I thought, like more or less fun. Spent a
(04:19):
couple of hours visiting with him in the hospital. My
mom also my brother soon thereafter, the baby shower wrapped
up and he met us at the hospital, so the
entire family at the hospital. All in all, it was
like a fairly normal day. And I remember thinking, Wow,
I was so worried about my dad and that fall,
but he actually seems like he's gonna be okay. He
(04:40):
seemed pretty stable and solid. The next day, I go
visit my dad in the hospital. I was surprised that
my mom had not made it, so I'm sort of
like waiting around for her, like where's Mom, Where's Mom?
And I tell my dad that I you know, I'm
just like, oh, I haven't heard from Mom all day.
He's like, that's a new usual. You should have your
(05:01):
brother go check on her. And he did go check
on her, and she had passed away. She died very unexpectedly.
The last time I saw her was we were in
the hospital with my dad and I had walked her
to her car, and I guess I feel sort of
(05:21):
grateful that the last thing I said to her, I
remember the moment like very clearly. It's like very much
burned into my memory that the last moment that she
had with my dad was quite tender, like they hugged
and they kissed and you know, embraced, and that I
walked her to her car, and that our last moment
was tender, like I think I said, I love you,
(05:42):
And I'm grateful that that's what I said, is the
last thing, because I certainly had no idea that it
was going to be the last time that I ever
saw her alive.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
You know, that's obviously he's so so terrible, I think,
to be with your dad in the hospital, you know,
a very concerning fall like he was in the hospital,
and then to lose your mom unexpectedly like two days later.
(06:12):
That's like a level of tragedy that I think many,
if not most people never experienced so like so much,
and so I just wanted to ask for the listener's benefit, like,
was did your mom have a lot of health problems?
Was this like something that was kind of expected or
(06:33):
or was it more out of the blue.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Completely out of the blue. My mom, you know, had
just turned seventy, so which was a big milestone birth
day for her. But in the scheme of things, seventy
is quite young, and so she didn't have like major
health complications. I will say the day, the last day
that we spent together, the day of my brother's baby shower,
was like a just a horribly hot day in Virginia.
(06:59):
It was like triple digits, you know. I was having
difficulty being out and about that day. I remember, notably,
it was like the hottest day of the summer, and
it was so hot that I remember thinking, like, I
wonder if they're going to cancel the baby shower because
it's so hot. Unfortunately, it's a long story, but we
were unable to do an autopsy, so I will never
(07:22):
really know what happened, which you know, was difficult for
me to accept that. But in some ways it doesn't matter.
I guess I've come to sort of that conclusion that
I'm definitely the kind of person who would really like
perseverates that the right word perseverate on the details and
(07:43):
the why and the how and the like could this
have been prevented? And that's definitely like a way that
I cope. And in some ways it's okay that I
I mean, I mean, it has to be okay. I've
had to have made peace with the fact that I'll
never know what happened, and you know that that is
how it has to be. But when I say it
(08:04):
was unexpected, like my mom, she had like a ring camera,
even though you know, we tell how much do I
rail against those? And my mom didn't listen to the show,
so she didn't hear we had to say about ring
So she had one. And the last thing that she
did was that she called to order delivery, like dinner
(08:26):
delivery food. And you know, she calls the order in
on her phone because we now have that. You see
the delivery driver come to her door, knock on the door,
you know, wait around, knock again, wait around. She doesn't answer,
So in between her calling to order food when she
(08:48):
got home after the last night that I saw her
at the hospital. She you know that past and you know,
as horrible as it was, I guess the way that
I'm trying to cope is really look for the bright
sides and the positive because the situation was so horrible
that it's the only thing I can do. And so, yeah,
(09:12):
there are positives. You know that she spent her last
day with her whole family. You know, she did not
appear to have been in any pain, Like it was
not like she had a fall. She was in her
in her favorite chair. Like when we found her at first,
you know, it looked like she was just asleep, so
(09:33):
she wasn't you know, it wasn't like she was like
face down on the floor or something, which is something
that I've sort of been clinging to. But yeah, was
very deeply unexpected. I was in informed of this by
my brother at the hospital. I didn't tell my dad.
I ran out of the hospital one of his nurses, who,
(09:54):
by the way, a theme of this episode might be
like shout out to nurses. Nurses are angels, because every
hero of this story has been a nurse. They'll get
to that later. But yeah, my dad's nurse was like,
oh my god, I like collapsed in the hospital hallway
and she held me and helped me get up and
was like she was like, don't tell your dad, just
go rushed home found her. I don't know if anybody
(10:20):
out there has ever found a loved one dead, but
it sticks with you. I guess I'll just put it
that way. It's very difficult. It's not something I wish on,
I would ever wish on my worst enemy. It's really hard.
It's not something you ever like forget.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, I can't imagine how difficult that must have been.
You know. I think your focus on like trying to
focus on some of those positive things that I mean,
I had no idea, but that seems seems like a
positive thing to think about. And you know, I think
(10:58):
the fact that it sounds like she when quickly without pain,
you know, I think that is something that when I've
had people close to me die often they haven't had that,
and I wish that they had. So I think that
truly is something.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Well spoiler alert, because I get to experience both. I'm special.
I'm that special that if you've ever wondered, like, well,
what I rather have my loved one die unexpectedly without
any pain in her sleep very quickly, or have them
fade away from a disease for which there is no
cure slowly, bit by bit. I got to tell you
(11:40):
both are bad. I'm experiencing both as we speaking. Spoiler
alert for how terrible the last few months have.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, so I definitely want to come back to your
mom because I've had I had the opportunity to meet her.
She was an amazing person and I uh.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
I loved to you, by the way.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Oh so I definitely want to come back to her.
But let's complete the story. So, like, what are you
talking about that you've gotten to experience both well?
Speaker 1 (12:15):
As I mentioned, my dad was in the hospital when
this happened, and when I left his room, I did
not tell him that my mom had died because it
sounds wild to say, but I genuinely did not believe
it. It was not until I saw her that I started
to believe it and believe it or not. Even a
little bit after, I like wasn't sure. I was like,
maybe something will happen. Once she was like in a casket,
(12:38):
I was like, okay, she probably this probably is what's happening,
but like that, but like that is how unexpected this
was to me. So, you know, I went home, was
talking to my family, and we decided that we had
to go back to the hospital the next day and
break the news to my dad. And as hard as
(12:58):
it was for me, my dad had it worse. I
really feel for my dad. So we had to break
the news to him in the hospital that you know,
he'd seen my mom for the last time, and from
there it was like something turned off in him. It
(13:18):
was like and maybe people who have been through something
like this can chime in and let me know, because
apparently it is not uncommon, but it was like a
light somewhere and my dad turned off. And since my
mom passed away, my dad has continued to get worse
and worse. Since that day that he was admitted to
(13:41):
the hospital on the fourth of July. He has not
walked since then. He has been in either a hospital
or a rehab facility, back to hospital, back to rehab,
back to hospital. He has not gone home. He has
not spent a single solitary moment, not in a facility
of some kind since then.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
And so just just to chime in, uh so we're
recording this on November one, and he entered on July fourth,
so that's.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
That's right months. And to give you a sense, like
a week before my dad was hospitalized in July, I
had had lunch with him in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and so
he got into his car, drove himself the hour and
changed away to Fredericksburg, walked into the restaurant. We had
a totally normal you know, no flags were raised. It's
(14:30):
not like so my dad went from like a pretty
independent person who had chronic health challenges, had this fall
and then it was like once once he heard about
my mom, it was yeah, I just the only I
can describe it as like something turned off in him.
And so he has continued to get worse and worse
(14:54):
and worse. He is currently hospitalized. I have really spent
most of my time since July with him. It's just yeah,
it's just been hard. So like I'm still very much
in this and you know, my mom has passed away.
My dad is not doing well. I have been living
(15:17):
in kind of various hotels and Arabian bees in Virginia
to be with him. Shout out to an amazing nonprofit
in Richmond. Virginia called Doorways because they provide low cost,
accessible housing that is near where my dad is hospitalized.
If not for them, I don't I don't know what
(15:37):
I would do. Like I've I've spent all my money
trying to be in Richmond to be with him because
he can't walk, can't really speak, needs someone to be
advocating for him, and that person is me. And so yeah,
it's been that's really been my life for the last
few months. But I do want to back up because
(16:02):
I said that this story had a tech angle, and
I meant it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah, that's right, you said there was that tech angle.
So and again I want to get to hearing about
your mom. But what is the what's the tech angle
in this story?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Well, so the day that my mom passed away was
July seventh. That was the day that we found her
less than twelve hours later. Imagine my surprise when an
obituary is published and goes semi viral on social media
(16:41):
about my mom. Now you might be asking, oh, did
someone in your family write this obituary like very early
on and submit it. That's what we thought, right, And
it makes sense that you would be thinking that, But
that is not what happened, So less than twelve hours
after we found my mom's dead body in her house,
before we had ever even informed my own father, Coamma,
(17:06):
her husband, Kamma, her next of kin of her death.
Imagine my surprise when a scammy AI obituary, pirate, piece
of shit media, whatever you want to call it, website
publishes a badly written, hacky, full of errors, full of
(17:27):
insidious ads obituary for my mom. This was before we
had a chance to go to the hospital to talk
to my dad. This was before we had informed the
entirety of our family. This was truly even before I
had really like internalized what had happened, This had already
gone viral on Facebook. Now I should say I would
(17:50):
call my mom kind of a local celebrity in our town.
My mom was a really respected and distinguished pediatrician, and basically,
if you were like a black person in Richmond, she
was probably your pediatrician, or you knew somebody who she
was their doctor. She has been in private practice for decades,
(18:11):
and so generations and generations and generations of people have
been treated by her. I would say that she's kind
of a town hero. Like when I would go out
to dinner with her, go to the mall with her. People.
I'm not kidding. And this is not just like the
rosy sheen that I'm putting on her because she was
my mom. This is like, like I mean this literally,
(18:33):
people would run out of shops to hug her for
saving their lives. I've seen this happen multiple times on
multiple different outings. People have run from inside shops to
hug her and say, you saved my daughter's life, you
saved my son's life, you saved my sister's life. Right,
So my mom was she a public figure, and I
think it's a little debatable. However, she was somebody that
(18:55):
had a profile in my town. I'll put it that way.
And so here's what I think happened. From the technical side. So,
my mom was a doctor who was like known for
never canceling appointments. She loved what she did. She was
a really hard worker. I think that when waves and
waves of appointments started getting canceled, rumors start flying that
(19:18):
something has happened to her. Because the demographic that she
serves in Richmond is also a demographic that is like
heavy on Facebook. If you searched my mom's name on Facebook.
It is like thousands and thousands and thousands of people
who are being like, what's going on with with my mom?
What's going on with her? What's going on with her?
You know? Is she alive? Is she okay? I've done
a lot of looking into this. Here's what I think
(19:40):
is going on. From a technical standpoint, I think that
people who are running scammy AI obituary shops online are
clogging it when someone's name is enjoying a boost from search,
when people are searching for someone's name a lot, when
people are using someone's name a lot on social media,
(20:00):
and that's how they determine we're going to cook up
an AI generated obituary for this person. And that is
exactly what they did. So I'm not kidding. I knew
she was gone for less than twelve hours when this
piece was published, and when it was published, it went
wildly viral on Facebook, to the point where people that
I had not spoken to in years, people I certainly
(20:22):
didn't tell what was going on, were texting me sending
me the link to the obituary being like, oh my god,
I heard about your mom. I'm so sorry, right, and
so mind you we hadn't talked to my dad yet.
I mean, I guess, like depending on how you look
at it. Luckily, my dad was not in a position
where he could be scrolling his phone. Had my dad
had his phone, he absolutely would have heard the news
(20:43):
about the death of his wife from Facebook. There's no
way that he would not have. The saving grace is
that my dad, in his state, was not able to
have his phone and be looking at his phone. Had
he had access to his phone, that is how he
would have found out about his wife passing away, not
from his kids, not from his family. I have to
pause there because, like, even talking about it now, it
(21:04):
makes me want to vomit. It like it fills me
with such rage and disgust for my fellow human that
it makes me I mean, you know, give report on
tech harms for four years and then they happen to you,
and you can't believe that the depravity and the depths
that people will go for to generate a quick buck online.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, it's truly despicable. I think there are a lot
of different perspectives in society. People have different values, but
I think one thing that pretty much every human I've
ever met, like has in common is that everybody recognizes
that when you lose a close member of your family,
that's hard and there should be some respect given. And
(21:50):
uh to take that kind of event and just turn
it into more seo chum to drive clicks or whatever
the scam was to monetize this event that to you
was like one of the most difficult things you've ever
been through, and to them is just like another data
(22:10):
point to monetize. It really is despicable and highlights like
the worst of the ways that technology can harm us.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
This was the worst day of my life was the
day that I found my mom's dead body in her house.
Every day since then has been a living nightmare from
which there is no waking up. And I will not
rest until the people who have monetized this day of
mine lose everything. This is like it's fucking war with me.
(22:43):
I will never be over this. It will be I will.
I will go to my grave shaming these people and
talking about this and speaking about this. So this is
not over by a long shot. I have some names,
so one of us you'll hear later on. But yeah,
I'm coming for all of you people, So I hope
you're fucking ready let's take a quick break at her back.
(23:21):
So you said you wanted to circle back to talking
about my mom, So let's do that because anybody who
knew my mom, met my mom, ever experienced my mom,
will tell you that she was a force. Like Again,
this is not me saying this because I'm her daughter,
although I do have a special affinity for her obviously,
But my mom was born into abject poverty in rural Virginia.
(23:46):
As an orphan. She worked in farms. You know, it's
just like a farm hand, bounced from family to family
and foster care working on farms in rural Virginia. She
was born with nothing. She worked her way up, was
at the top of her school in college, top of
her classes in med school, became probably the top rated
(24:09):
pediatrician in our town. Right the day that she died.
The week after that, the whole family was meant to
be going to Virginia Beach to watch her get a
massive award for pediatrics. Right, my mom has been on
National Spotlight, She's been on the Today Show talking about
the work that she's done for childhood literacy. She is
(24:30):
an amazing person who has had a dynamic and multifaceted
life story. Anybody who has met her could tell you
what a colorful person she was, What a smart person
she was, What a funny person she was, What a
warm person, what she was, What a passionate person she was,
(24:52):
What an a pitiated person she was? Like she was
a person who lived in full color. Right. The thing
that pisses me off the mo about this AI obituary
that they published about her is that it's so generic
and so flat. They say, oh, she was a pediatrician
who was specialized in children's medicine. Well, what the fuck
(25:13):
else would a pediatrician specialize in. That's like saying, oh,
he was a firefighter who specialized in flames. Obviously she
specialized in children's medicine. The way that it's written, it's
just the most AI generated, flat piece of bullshit I
have ever read in my life, And it is so
deeply offensive to me. If a human was sitting down
to write an obituary about my mom, there are so
(25:34):
many things that you obviously would have included. The first
obituary that was published, because there was a handful of them,
did not include one single detail. It was all vagaries.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah, and you know, I know we have a lot
of younger listeners who maybe have not yet had the
experience of having a close loved one die. And to you,
I say, congratulations. Keep writing that wave as long as
you can, but it is coming, and when it does,
you will realize that obituaries are important. I don't know.
(26:08):
I personally didn't really think much of them until my
grandparents passed a few years ago and I was very
close with them. I personally wrote their obituaries and it
was a really meaningful thing for me, and I think
something meaningful for my family, and it just really like,
it means a lot to have an obituary that does
(26:30):
reflect who the person was in their life, and yet
the sting of having that taken away, it would make
my blood boil.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Oh, my blood is boiling, my friend, my blood is boiling.
And it is even worse that I am not alone.
So it turns out that this kind of practice is
actually commonplace, and it's been going on for a while.
It has been made worse by the proliferation of AI.
Funeral homes have actually been fighting oh bitch, wear a scam,
(27:00):
obituary pirates whatever you want to call it, for fifteen
twenty years, but it's really taken off with technology. I
actually was interviewed for an article in Fast Company after
this happened. The article I'll link it in the show notes,
but it's like almost difficult for me to read because
when I was interviewed, I was still very much I mean,
(27:22):
I'm still in the thick of it now, but I
was like really in the thick of it then. And
in the interview, I feel like I come off as
like unwell, and I was unwell, like I really was,
you know, I had just buried my mom. I had
and this was totally unexpected. I was literally sleeping in
(27:44):
my dad's I see you room for a month, so
like his room has a couch in it, I was
just curling up on my couch and that's where I
was living for a literal month. I was dealing with
all of his health stuff, talking to doctors every day,
trying to figure out how to you know, you know,
my mom died unexpectedly, so trying to figure out all
of her like a state stuff, her will, like all
(28:06):
of this like incredibly complicated stuff, funeral arrangements, stuff that
we had never talked about, which we'll get into that
in a minute. But I was just struggling. I was
I was on well. So it's almost hard for me
to go back and read that article because I'm like,
oh my god, like I was really in it. But yeah,
when someone is going through one of the most difficult times.
(28:27):
For me, it wasn't just one of the most it
was the most difficult time of my entire life. Having
there be obituary pirates who are capitalizing off of that,
and adding to that, I wanted to die. It just
was really hard. And you know what made it worse
was that the AI generated obituaries hit the Internet very
(28:48):
quickly and went viral on Facebook very quickly. And so
when our family actually submitted a real obituary written by
my aunt Ruth, who did a beautiful job, when that
was submitted to the funeral home and put on line
for a while, the AI generated obituary still had more reach.
Like when you googled my mom's name plus obituary, the
(29:08):
ones that were written by her family with actual information,
not to mention, you know, no inaccuracies. Because the AI
generated ones had inaccuracies, those were not as high up
on Google for a time as the ones that were bullshit,
and so you know, you were talking about how obituaries matter.
They matter for so many reasons, not the least of
which is, you know, the obituary written by our family
(29:32):
had information about the services, information about how you could
connect with the family. I go on to these, you know,
AI scammy sites, and there are real people who my
mom actually knew leaving condolences. They don't know that that
has nothing. Our family didn't authorize that, they didn't put
that up right. And so that's just a logistical reason
as to why these are so messed up. But you're right,
(29:56):
obituaries matter. Obituaries it it matters when someone passes away.
The act of writing an obituary is important, and you know,
you write them for other people. You write them for humans.
You don't write them to generate money. And you don't
(30:16):
take away someone's right to mourn their mother the way
that they want to do it. You don't take that
away from them. That was stolen from me. Other than
my close family and like my close close circle of friends,
I didn't tell anybody my mom passed away, and they
all knew. They all knew from that AI bullshit. I
(30:37):
can't even express what that feels like like I feel
like I was robbed of the opportunity to mourn my
mother on my own terms. Grieving is hard enough, having
to grieve in this digital fish bowl is just I
can't even describe what that felt like. I'm still I'm
still not over it. Maybe I'll never be over it.
And you know, I just distinctly remember having this moment
(31:01):
maybe an hour after my family met at my dad's
hospital room to tell him that my mom had died,
where it was me, my brother, my sister in law,
my aunts, my mom's sisters, and somebody had sent one
of the AI generated obituaries to my aunt, and we
all had this moment where we were like who published this,
who submitted this? And I don't want to say we
(31:24):
were like accusing each other, but it was a tense moment.
It was a moment of like, who in this very
close circle of like friends and family went to the
media and come to find out, none of us did.
That was just just a thing that was taken from
us by scammers. And so yeah, that was a moment
(31:47):
on top of the worst moment of my life that
we didn't need as a family. We already had enough
on our plates as a family, and yeah, the fact
that this is a common practice is just unacceptable. Here's
a here, there's a bit from the Fast Company article
that I was quoted in. I didn't say this, but
this was what the journalist wrote. AI generated obits are
(32:08):
now filling the web, marking a new chapter in the
quest to monetize grief. Many of these sites turning out
AI generated content exploiting the dead are based in Asia
and appear to be run solely to generate ad revenue.
As I said, my mom was a bit of a
I don't know, I'm a call of a celebrity, but
like she was like a known entity in our town. However,
(32:31):
Fast Company also spoke to people who didn't have any
kind of public profile, for whom these scammy rags still
published AI obituaries for. In some cases, the person is
not even really dead. A journalist wrote a piece about
the anxiety that she experiences while driving on LA's freeways,
and she told CNN that she believes that the spike
in online traffic attached to her name from that piece
(32:54):
being published is why scammers decided to say that she
died on the internet. Their hope is that that little
spike in traffic attached to her name means that more
people will click on that obituary, which will lead to
monetary revenue for whoever's putting that up. But she wasn't dead.
In fact, she was sitting in a hospital room helping
a friend through surgery when her phone started blowing up
(33:15):
because these videos of AI generated news anchors were talking
about how she died in a car crash. She said,
I was sad. Reading your own obituary is a surreal experience.
After speaking with experts, I was scared for myself, for
all journalists, and for our society. And yeah, I'm also scared. Yeah,
(33:36):
it is scary. You know.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
One of the things that you mentioned, that was talked
about in some of those articles that you shared ahead
of this recording was the idea that these obituary pirates
have been doing this for twenty years, maybe a little
bit longer, and so it does seem like a good
example of the sort of harm that has been ongoing,
(34:01):
the sort of tech enabled harm that has really been
like turbocharged with AI to allow them to churn these
out so much faster and more cheaply.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Exactly, but even the ones that are not necessarily AI
generated are still pretty creepy. Kate nibs Over at Wired
reported on how YouTubers are modifying this practice by just
summarizing obituaries of dead strangers in videos. Somebody was upset
enough by this after watching strangers make videos hastily summarizing
(34:34):
a good friend's death that they reached out to her,
she writes. Sometimes these obituary YouTubers promote products in the
video description, like a two hundred and twenty five dollars
vitamin sea cream for sale on Amazon. Sometimes they just
list strings of SEO, baiting keywords like death, cause of death, die, rip,
what happened? While each channel differs from the next in
small ways, there's a unifying aesthetic. Everything looks rushed and careless.
(34:57):
There's no hint of emotion or acknowledgment that they're discussing
someone's greatest tragedy. And as you said, Mike, this is
not new. Funeral homes have been dealing with obituary aggravator
sites for fifteen or twenty years. This is from Courtney Miller,
chief strategy officer at MkJ Marketing, who specializes in funeral services.
She says that the site's trall news articles and local
(35:18):
funeral home websites looking for an initial death announcement that
has basic details like name, age, and where a service
might be held. They then scrape and republish that content
at scale using templated formats or today increasingly AI tools.
So basically these people are just exploiting SEO and like
Google trends and things like that. SEO expert Chris silver
(35:39):
Smith says there's a whole new strategy in search rankings,
and I believe it's based off of getting information that
someone has died and seeing there's a little spike in
traffic perhaps in a specific region for that person's name,
and rapidly optimizing and publishing articles about the person to
get these dribbles of search traffic.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Dribbles of search traffic is such a like diminutive term,
but that feels correct here, Like it's hard to imagine
that they're making any sort of serious money off any
individual obituary, And I guess it's really like the scale
of it that allows this to be a fruitful enterprise
(36:19):
for these scammers to take people's lives and flatten them
down in this way, to almost like turn people's death
into a commodity, Like what is the business model there
is it that Well.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
It's pretty much exactly that. They just start playing on
the surge of interest in keywords related to death s'suck
my mom's name, and they just pump out low effort
content to try to capitalize on that flow of web traffic.
It's really a numbers game, and I think that's why
it kind of like has to be so low effort,
because I don't think that anybody was making a lot
(36:52):
of money individually from my mom's AIBS obituary. But if
you do it for enough people, if you crank them out,
crank them out, and crank them out in aggregate, you
can probably make some money. And obituaries really are big business.
A Wired piece called the Morbid War over online Obituaries
from twenty twenty one describes this company, Echovita. These people
(37:15):
are basically a ring of obituary scammers. So companies like
Echovita they take this scam a step further. So Echovita
was sued by Service Corporation International, which is like a
conglamorate of fifteen hundred funeral homes, and they alleged that
the company was scraping details from obituaries written by family
members from funeral home websites and just republishing them. Quote.
(37:39):
Mining people's personal data at the lowest point in their
lives is disappointing. A spokesperson for the Funeral Conglamorate told
Wired in an email. So Echovita makes money through purporting
to connect mourners with flower delivery services or other like
funeral services that they then profit from. But wait, I'm sorry.
Did I give these fucking goals permission to profit financially
(38:02):
from my mom's death? No? I fucking didn't. I've never
talked to these people. I don't know these people, and
yet when I searched their scam enterprise website, what you know,
there's my mom's name, there's my mom's information next to
these like insidious scammy pop up ads that are like, oh,
for thirty dollars, you can plant a tree in honor
(38:25):
of my mom. Also side note, my mom would have
hated that. She would have thought that was so hacky.
She would have never approved that. I didn't approve that,
yet on their website, these guls are making money off
of my dead mother without anybody in my family's permission.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
So terrible and like big money, Like you said.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Right, So, according to a piece about another lawsuit against Ecuovida,
the company has an option for people to claim an
obituary right. So I could provide documentation to Echovida proving
that my mom is my mom at If I did that,
I could then take a cut of whatever profit they
make from flowers, in candles or whatever else. But I'm sorry,
(39:08):
that is just gross. Why should I have to prove
to you that I am my mother's daughter. You a
stranger that I have not provided to have anything to
do with me or my family. Why do I need
to provide documentation to you to prove anything? Who gave
you permission to have my mom's name on your scam website?
Speaker 2 (39:27):
And how generous of them to give you some undefined
cut of their choschke sales.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I'm not even sure that people would actually get the
flowers or the tree is actually planted, because, according to
the trust Pilot reviews and EcoVida, the flowers that people
are sending the money to buy might not even show up,
and the company is just like pocketing the money. Here's
one review from trust Pilot quote, these are leech companies
that take obituaries from legitimate funeral home site and post
(39:55):
them on their own sites to profit from The obituary
is often inaccurate. They are just trying to sell try,
et cetera without permission or authorization from their families. They
just did this to us on the loss of my
fourteen year old grandson. Our funeral director has made several
attempts to stop this, but always hits a dead end.
I have warned everyone we shared our obituary with, and
I am writing a letter to the Secretary of State.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
It's kind of surprising that they are still doing this
with impunity, given stories like that from a grandmother who
sounds like she's pretty mad. Listening to you sounds like
you're pretty mad. I wouldn't want to be the focus
of that.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
Ire Oh Ethovida CEO, Paco Laclerk, your name is going
to be on my lips and on my fingers for
the rest of both of our lives. I'm going to
be on your ass like white on Rice. You will
never shake me. My family is own an apology. I
am getting that apology, rest assured. Also, fun fact about
(40:52):
Ecovita is like, I mean, you know, Mike, you know
I love reading when there's like a review site and
somebody leaves a bad review, owner comes on to be like,
that's not true. You did get those chicken fingers blah.
If you go on to the trust pilot reviews for Echovida,
somebody I assume it's Echovida ceo Paco la Clerk is
(41:13):
arguing back with everybody. So because if all of these
people being like, these people are scammers, they are trying
to profit off the death of my child, These people
are ghouls, And then you have the owner or somebody
replying to each of you being like, that's not true.
We're a legitimate business. You're lying. If you find yourself
arguing back with dozens of people who are who are
(41:34):
accusing you angrily of scamming and making money from their
dead family members, give it up, Like, at what point
are you? At what point did you take a step
back and be like, am I the ghoul? Here? Am
I the one and the wrong here? Like, once you're
arguing with multiple people who are grieving, the asshole is
you Pacoh? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:52):
That does seem like it should be a pretty clear
signal that like maybe one needs to take a look
at what they are doing. If they are are engaged
in lots of online disputes with grieving family members.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Correct, So let's talk more about our friend. Pascal Paco,
la Clerk, owner of Echo Vita so Lecourt, claims that
his company their mission is virtuous. He's just informing the
public of recent deaths at the public service. He says
that anybody can publish obituaries on his website for free
and says quote, in reality, the funeral home should never
(42:26):
be the owner of an obituary. The obituary's purpose is
to share information with the public. So in my case,
is it Paco's job to inform my ill father of
the unexpected death of his wife of forty years. Is
it Paco's job or is it his family's job? Because
(42:47):
I feel like my dad doesn't even know who Paco
fucking is and he needs to stay out of it.
This idea that he is doing a virtuous public service
and that the public has a right to know when
someone passes. If you've ever had the misfortune of having
to bury a loved one, especially unexpectedly, it is very
difficult and it is nobody's business but the family and
(43:09):
the grieving person to decide how and when that information
is distributed. What is this idea that when somebody dies automatically,
the entire public has to be informed. Like I'm telling you,
it is such a callous way of robbing the grieving
from what should be an intimate process that they can
(43:31):
work out on their own as a family. Nobody has
the right to swoop in and inform the public before
the family is even ready to do that, and they
certainly shouldn't be doing it to make a quick buck.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Like Pascal Paco Laclerk is truly detestable.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Yeah, he's a real piece of shit. More after a
quick break, let's get right back into it. So you
might be wondering how did Egovida come to be? Well,
(44:09):
before Echovida, there was a company called Afterlife that was
shuddered after a ruling, a twenty million dollar ruling against
them for pirating the obituaries and pictures of dead people
in order to profit from grieving families. I have to
say the judge in this case, Federal Court Judge Catherine Kine,
really laid down the law, and she said that the
(44:30):
reason she was being so intense was because she thought
that their behavior was high handed, reprehensible, and marked a
departure from standards of decency, and so she was like,
I need to like make an example of them so
they will never never do this again. Get a load
of this quote that Paco gave to The Globe after
the judge's ruling on Afterlives. So Afterlives, unlike Echovida, Echovida
(44:52):
at least uses Ai to kind of Frankenstein the obituaries
just enough so they sound a little bit different. So
it's like not totally just explicitly copy and pasting. After
Lives was just that touching obituary that you wrote for
your grandfather, Mike, They would just a copy paste on that.
Bad boy, steal a picture of your grandfather from your Facebook,
(45:14):
put it up there, add a link to buy a
tree that maybe between you and me nobody would ever get,
pocket the money and fucking profit, and then bounce to
the next one.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
How would you feel about that, Well, sir, I wouldn't
like it.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
No, So it might not surprise you to find that
that is against the law. But after that twenty million
dollar ruling which shuddered Afterlife, this is the quote that
our friend Paco stand up Guy, gave to the Globe.
Quote the day we heard that publishing obituaries on the
Internet similar to that of newspapers, and using photos and
(45:48):
original text was unacceptable. We immediately stopped operating the company. Homie,
why would you think that stealing the photos of dead
strangers is an acceptable way to make money in the
first place.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
And then he went on to start this other company
that does the same thing but a little bit different
so that it can avoid copyright infringement.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Right, yes, yes, exactly that. And so the new company, EcoVida,
it is big business. Paco says that he this company
has generated five million dollars in revenue off of people's
obituaries in twenty twenty alone. Much like Afterlives, the company
that was shuttered after that twenty million dollar ruling, Ecovita
takes commissions on flowers, candles, and tree sales. The only
(46:30):
difference is he's not republishing or stealing the obituaries verbatim
and pictures of dead people. He's sort of pulling information
from other obituaries, so there's a little bit of grayl
area and then profiting off of them. But still oftentimes
those obituaries are incorrect or have incomplete information.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Going back to the AI generated obituary about your mom.
It was shocking how they could cram so little information
into so many words. It just really was like so vague.
As a little experiment, I asked chat gpt to write
me a five hundred word obituary for a beloved pediatrician
(47:11):
from Richmond, and it was almost identical that flattening that
you talked about. I think, you know, this phenomenon does
highlight a lot of the tech stuff that we've talked
about for years, and I think one of them is
how technology has this tendency to just flatten us, and,
like you said, for these obituaries, just harvest what's available,
(47:32):
make up what isn't, and then just churn out some
chum exactly.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
One of the people also interviewed for that Fast Company
article talked about losing his father and his father had
been a service member, and in the AI generated version
of his dad's obituary, it is this like like they
made up awards that he never won. They made him
a more decorated veteran than he was, and he was like,
my dad was a great guy. But I can see
(47:57):
where the AI tried to like jazz up this story,
and I guess it sort of goes back to what
you were saying is that obituaries are for humans. They're
for the living to grieve people that we loved. They
are a record for how we lived, who we were,
how we loved, who loved us, who knew us. Writing
(48:19):
an obituary for somebody is an intimate, special act. It
is adding to the public record of who they were.
I don't want to live in a world where it's
just another way for a tech douche to make money.
I don't want to live in a world where my
mom's beautiful, colorful, full, dynamic, crazy life is just flattened
(48:45):
out so people like Paco La Clerk can get a
nickel in their bank account. That is not the world
I want to live in. Grieving and death is hard enough.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Absolutely, Like that judge said, who you read from it
violates basic ideas of decency. Somebody ought to do something.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Yeah, well, Paco la Clerk says, quote, I want to
use technology to become a disruptor of the industry, meeting
the funeral industry. Paco la Clerk, I don't know you,
we have never met. I don't want my mom's death
and my grieving process to be a pit stop on
your disruption of the funeral industry. I don't give a
(49:26):
fuck about your disruption. You have no right to be
exploiting grieving people using technology. This is what kills me
about this person is that the way that he speaks
in these interviews, I would almost respect it more if
he was like, yeah, I'm a scammer. It's a scam.
It's if I do it enough times, I make a
quick buck. That's why I'm doing it. It's a financial scam.
(49:48):
At least I would be like, Okay, he's being honest.
The thing that kills me is that, because it has
to do with technology, he wants to exploit my dead
mom and my family for money and also be seen
as a titan of industry for doing it. He wants
to be seen as a thought leader for doing it.
He is a scammer. If I took a picture of
(50:09):
Pacola Clerk's dead family member and screen printed it on
a T shirt and started selling it down on Fourteenth Street,
you will call me a scammer. Right, that's a scam
If I did that with that his permission. Because it
involves technology, he believes that it is some kind of
a disruption, as opposed to what it is which is
a violation. And I refuse to live in a world
(50:29):
where somebody can exploit me and my mom and my
family for money for their financial gain against my will,
without my permission, and also have the gall to see
himself as a goddamn visionary not on my watch. So again,
this is not gonna be the last time we talked
about Pacola, Clerk, Paco. Look, Clerk, I am your new
biggest fan. We're going to talk about you every fucking week. Uh,
(50:52):
get used.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
To it, all right, bridget So how do you want
to land this plane? Do you want to circle back
to your mom, you want to talk about your dad,
You want to share what you've learned about going through
this process that might help listeners who are either going
through it or maybe aren't going through it yet but
(51:13):
see it coming down the pike.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
Oh my god, what can I say? I would say
everybody listening to this, if you have parents in your life,
loved ones, older folks. My mom died unexpectedly and none
of her affairs were in order, I'll put it that way,
and it's made everything much harder. And yeah, I would say,
(51:38):
if you are avoiding a tough conversation with your mom
or your dad or your aunt about what their end
of life plans look like. Have the conversation, because you're
going to be dealing with it one way or the other.
One route is it's gonna be hard regardless. So you
got to decide if you want to have that conversation
and get affairs an order now and have it be
(51:59):
regular hard or hard hard. So that's one. So end
of life care plans, whatever needs to be arranged. I
really implore people to make those arrangements while you can,
because it's very difficult to make them otherwise. Take it
from me. Yeah, I would also say, like I am
still very much in it. If I sound not like myself,
(52:23):
it's because I am not myself and I don't know
if myself is ever coming back. This might be a
permanent change for me. And yeah, it's just as hard
as everything was. I think the feeling of having my
grief be exploited, Like I don't think I ever really
(52:46):
got to privately grieve my mom and grieve my dad,
to be honest with you, and like really sort of
grieve what happened to my family. There's been a real
lack of intimacy. I can't quite describe the feeling of
being in like a digital fish bowl while you're going
through something as hard and intimate as grief. It was
(53:07):
really invasive. I have to say, like I really kind
of shut down, you know, when those AI obituaries hit
social media. I was not yet ready to talk about
what was happening, and I had to talk about it
because people were texting me about it and asking me
about it because of these obituaries and so like, I
didn't even want to post my own kind of private
(53:30):
tribute to my mom because of all of this. I like,
I really still haven't because the time that I would
have done that, I was dealing with this, right I
was like trying to find where these plate, where these
AI obituary pirates were based, and trying to get things
taken down off of the Internet and all of that. Right,
(53:52):
so I felt very exposed and it was very hard.
I am still very much in it. So this is
not the sort of like ending of like and now
everything's okay. Everything is terrible for me and I don't
know when it's going to get better. But I would
say the thing that I have learned from all of
this is that when we talk about things like AI.
(54:14):
It really does matter, right, like obituaries matter. Some things
are for humans, some things are There are things that
connect us to our humanity, there are things that connect
us to the experience of being human. All of us
is going to die. I'm so sorry to say this,
but everyone listening right now, if you have not already,
(54:34):
you are going to be burying a parent or someone
that you know and love. And that is a universal
that is something that connects us and makes us all human.
And so we got to decide whether this, this thing
that connects us to our humanity, is a thing that
we are going to allow tech companies and tech leaders
to exploit to make money for themselves against our will.
(54:55):
And I think that this is I am. I am.
If I have ever put a a line in the sand,
I am doing it now. We have to fight this.
Nobody wants to live in a world where when you
lose somebody this is acceptable, let alone commonplace. I will
not stand for it. I don't think any of us
should stand for this. Nobody deserves to live in that world.
That is not a world that I want to live in.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
All right, All right, well, so are we going to
be back here again next week to talk about. Uh,
let's see what's up next on the agenda. Poco Laclerk.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
I'll say this, Pascal, Paco Laclerk, get in touch with me.
I want to hear from you. I want to talk
to you. I know I'm going to be on your
radar soon. However, if you come to me, we can
deal with this. I'd have you on the show. We
can talk whatever you want to do, but this is
sort of your window. I'm going to be a problem
(55:50):
for you. Mark my words. If anybody knows him, you
can send him this episode. I'm going to be a
problem for you one way or another. Make it easy
for yourself by getting in touch with me. I'll just
leave it there.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
So, yeah, Bridget, thanks for coming and recording this. I
know listeners will I don't want to say be happy
to hear from you, given the subject matter, but listeners
have been asking, and so it's and I know it
was difficult, but I do really hope that I don't know,
recording this episode maybe helps you start to feel a
(56:23):
little bit normal. You know, you mentioned that you don't
know if you're ever coming back, and you know we're
always changing all the time, and something like this I'm
sure would profoundly change a person. But you'll get through it,
and I hope that you know, we can all get
through it together. And I know you're not planning. We're
(56:46):
not coming back into regular production right now, but hopefully,
hopefully we'll get back there when you're ready.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
Yeah, thanks for going on this journey with me, Mike.
Speaker 2 (56:57):
My mom loved you, and there were so many things
about your mom. I maybe got to know like one
percent of things about your mom. But the first time
that we met, you know, this is the public health
nerd in me. We talked about childhood let exposure because
that is some research that I did while I was
in grad school. And it turned out that throughout her
(57:19):
career she had worked with the State of Virginia or
the Virginia Department of Public Health to really advocate for
and get enacted a set of programs to reduce the
prevalence of childhood let exposure for kids in the state
of Virginia, which is so important. And you know, I'm
(57:42):
sure that that made a huge difference in the lives
of hundreds of thousands of children. So, you know, just
just one little detail of this amazing woman and I
really feel grateful that I got to meet her.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
I thought you were going to tell the egg story. So,
like Mike notes, I love eggs. I'm obsessed with eggs,
and my mom also really loved eggs. And we go
to dinner, so it's like I think it was just
was it you? Me and her. We were at dinner
and she ordered like ten plates of devils.
Speaker 2 (58:15):
They were good, and she just kept ordering more plates
of deviled eggs and we kept eating them, so like
eating them, just kept eating eggs.
Speaker 1 (58:23):
I was in heaven and I didn't think anything was
weird because I love eggs and I know my mom
loves eggs, So like, had you not said something going
to be I was like, what do you mean it's
not normal to eat twelve deviled eggs in a city? God,
I'm also was really, I I don't want that will
be here. If it's just like a free for all
with me telling stories of my mom, I could. I
could do it for my dad too. But like she
(58:44):
really was like a great person. She had a great laugh.
There was God, I would kill to hear my mom's
laugh again, Like it was like music. She had a
really and she was easy to laugh that was My
favorite quality about my mom is that she was really smiley,
easy to laugh. It's something I aspire to and I
hope it's something that I carrie in her and she
(59:07):
The other thing about her is that she loved her granddaughter.
It is such a tragedy that she did not get
to meet her newest grandkids because my brother and his
wife had twins, so there's two new ones out there.
But she had a really special relationship with my niece
and she spent a lot of time with her, and
(59:28):
my niece will will laugh in a way that my
mom did. That kind of gets me. I see a
lot of my mom in my niece and she's only four,
but she'll say things or she'll laugh in a kind
of way, and I really it's like almost scary how
I can see my mom shining through my niece. And
I hope she I know, I hope she haunts me.
(59:50):
I just like would do anything to just talk to her,
like one more time. So yeah, like I know, people
have all different kinds of relationships with their family, but
you know, it's hard. It's very hard to lose them.
(01:00:11):
And whether you lose them because they pass away or
you lose them because they're not in your life for
another reason, or whether you lose them because they're like
my dad dealing with dementia and you've kind of lost
them even though they're still here. It's just so hard.
So yeah, I hate to end it on a bummer,
but this is what it means to be a human
(01:00:35):
and everybody has to go through this. I'm not the
first person to go through this. People listening will all
go through this in some capacity. And you know, as
hard as it is, we don't have to tolerate it
being made harder in these ways that pull us apart
from who we are as humans, Like this is human,
this is greef. It's ugly, it's horrible, it's messy already.
(01:00:58):
It doesn't also have to be a way that we
get exploited. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech,
or just want to say hi? You can read us
at Hello at tangody dot com. You can also find
transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are
No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Todd.
(01:01:19):
It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed. Creative Jonathan Strickland
is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and
sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host,
Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate
and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
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