Mark Twain famously told a reporter in the 1890s, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Knewz.com has learned about a 21st-century version of that: real people’s death notices created through artificial intelligence, even though they’re still alive.
Death-scamming has brought several new policies from Google in recent weeks. But that was too late for Los Angeles Times journalist Deborah Vankin.
Vankin is alive and well. But she’s also a bit upset, because she didn’t know she was reported as dead until she sat in a Southern California hospital waiting room caring for a friend in January.
Someone went all-gravesite-in on Vankin. Not only was a faux obituary written about her life, but fake television “news anchors” talked about her career with video of a car crash.
Vankin found out she was allegedly dead from her father. It turned out her aunt had received a Google notification with her name announcing the bogus death.
“I was mostly confused at first, then outraged,” Vankin told CNN.
Vankin decided not to read the online tributes. Some of them clearly were questionable, such as one made with AI beginning, “Deborah Vankin Death, an esteemed journalist…”
But why would anyone do this? One digital marketer offers a one-word answer: clickbait.
Joshua Klopfenstein of Lindenwood Marketing, a company that assists funeral homes, says the articles are posted by websites which emphasize keywords from Google searches.
“For most funeral home websites, obituaries account for 80% to 85% of all visitors,” Klopfenstein explained. “A scammer needs to pirate a ton of obituaries … to get enough traffic to generate significant ad revenue.”
The New York Times tracked down one such alleged scammer in India. He admitted using AI to produce blog articles after searching online for trending words such as “accident,” “death” and “obituary.”
“There’s very low startup costs for this,” said Robert Wahl, AI expert and associate professor at Concordia University Wisconsin. “You can generate this for little to no cost. And it can pay some revenue, so there’s an incentive to do it.”
But the payoff for that clickbait isn’t much. The man in India said one post brings a few cents per month from advertising.
Overseas scams are harder to prosecute. So the death scammers potentially could become as common as those infamous Nigerian emails.
False rumors about celebrity deaths were around long before AI. OK! Magazine recalled Cher was reported dead by some people on Twitter (now X) in 2012, but it wasn’t true.
But nowadays, even when people actually have died, AI obituaries distort their life stories.
Sharon Springs, New York Mayor Doug Plummer died from cancer in December 2023. Friends say that led to “fake obits” from all over the country by people he never met.
“Facts were wrong,” Corbie Mitleid told WFXT-TV in Boston. “Some of them said he died in an accident… it was awful.”
An official with the American Association of Retired Persons warned the scams could lead to fake GoFundMe accounts promising to help a dead person’s family.
A Google spokesperson said the company recently updated its search policies to reduce “the presence of obituary spam” in results.
The AARP recommends people contact funeral homes to confirm reports that someone actually is dead.
Vankin is trying to gain a positive lesson about life after being declared dead.
“I do have bucket list travel plans brewing,” she said. “It lit a fire.”
But for Hawaii’s Brian Vastag, who encountered his own phony death notices online after his one-time partner killed herself in December 2023, it’s a sad lesson about misinformation.
“The internet has turned into a pile of nonsense,” Vastag said.
The post A.I. ‘Killing’ the Living: People’s Fake Obituaries Are Appearing in Latest Online Clickbait Scam: Reports appeared first on Knewz.
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Author: Richard Burkard
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