Even the most heartfelt prompt can go heartbreakingly wrong.
Using AI to generate obituaries might feel efficient, especially when grief leaves you foggy and exhausted. But automating something so personal can unravel fast, leading to emotional missteps that sting long after the funeral flowers wilt.
The promise of convenience often comes at the cost of authenticity, sensitivity, and sometimes even factual accuracy. If you’re thinking about relying on AI to write a tribute for someone you loved, there are some deeply human reasons to reconsider.
1. The tone can feel eerily generic or cold.
AI obituary generators often default to bland sentimentality or formal clichés. You might end up with phrases like “was loved by all who knew them” or “left a legacy of kindness,” which could technically describe almost anyone. That’s not comforting when you’re trying to honor someone whose quirks and complexity made them unforgettable.
When you’re grieving, a lifeless tribute can feel like a second loss. The absence of warmth or unique storytelling can make the whole thing feel manufactured, which only deepens the emotional disconnect, according to The Washington Post. You want your loved one’s memory to pulse with life—not read like a template from a sympathy card.
2. Important details may be factually wrong.
Even when you input the correct data, AI obituary tools have a strange tendency to infer or hallucinate. It might invent academic degrees, misstate relationships, or include job titles your loved one never held. When the errors are discovered, it’s often after the obituary has already gone public or been printed.
These inaccuracies aren’t just embarrassing—they can spark family tensions or diminish the sincerity of the tribute. If someone’s military service is omitted or a spouse’s name is wrong, it becomes more than a typo, as shared by CNET. It’s a painful oversight that undermines your intent to honor them truthfully.
3. Religious and cultural nuances can be completely missed.
Obituaries often carry sacred significance within specific religious or cultural frameworks. AI, unless highly trained for your exact context, frequently stumbles. It may omit a prayer, misunderstand mourning customs, or get burial traditions wrong in ways that feel tone-deaf or even disrespectful.
Grief rituals matter. They help people process loss and honor the dead properly, as reported by The Atlantic. When AI gets those details wrong, it can feel like your loved one’s memory was flattened or misrepresented. Worse, it might leave surviving family members hurt or offended in a moment when everyone’s already raw.
4. It may include inappropriate or irrelevant information.
You might enter a few simple facts, but AI sometimes fills in gaps with bizarre or oddly placed details. Suddenly your mother’s obituary includes an awkward reference to the rise of social media, or it weirdly highlights her love of toast like it was a defining trait.
The problem is, algorithms can’t always tell what’s meaningful versus what’s trivial. You end up proofreading a strange, sometimes surreal document that leaves you wondering how your memories got turned into a disjointed resume. It takes time and emotional energy to fix something that was supposed to save you both.
5. The writing can come off as weirdly robotic.
Even when the facts are correct, the way AI strings them together can feel mechanical or awkward. You might get transitions like “Furthermore, he enjoyed baseball” or sentences that sound like they were copied from a chatbot in a bad mood. It doesn’t sound like something a grieving child, spouse, or sibling would write.
When you read a tribute out loud at a memorial, you want it to feel human. You want people to smile, tear up, or nod in recognition. If the words feel cold or clunky, you’re not just memorializing poorly—you’re missing a sacred chance to comfort others through shared memory.
6. It can strip away humor, warmth, and personality.
Many AI generators lean heavily on solemnity. They default to a kind of soft-spoken sadness that’s appropriate for some, but completely wrong for others. If your uncle was the loudest laugh in the room or your sister was hilariously inappropriate, a lifeless eulogy won’t feel right.
Trying to inject personality after the fact can be tricky. You’ll find yourself editing every sentence, adding quirks and color back in. That emotional labor is often harder than just starting from scratch. And worse, people reading the original version might assume your loved one was dull or unremarkable—which couldn’t be further from the truth.
7. You might lose the chance to process your own grief.
Writing an obituary is often an unexpected form of therapy. It forces you to reflect, remember, and distill a life into a few paragraphs—something that, while painful, can also be incredibly healing. Handing that task to a machine may seem like a relief, but it can rob you of a meaningful part of saying goodbye.
AI can’t feel the weight of absence. It won’t pause mid-sentence because it remembers a smell or a joke or the way someone laughed. You will. And that pause, that ache, is part of what makes your tribute real. Skipping that process might leave you feeling disconnected from both the grief and the goodbye.