More Ontario funeral directors are using AI to help write obituaries

Artificial intelligence has been creeping into our lives — and now, it's also finding a way into death, with Ontario funeral directors experimenting with how to use AI to help bereaved families compose obituaries.  

The funeral industry has been exploring ways to integrate AI and augmented reality (AR) into its practices since OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November, according to the Ontario Funeral Service Association (OFSA). 

The AI chat bot allows users to type in a question or a task, and the software will come up with a response designed to mimic human writing. It's trained on an enormous amount of data — known as a large language model — that helps it provide sophisticated answers to users' questions and prompts. 

"I would consider it like an extra person in the room that is able to provide creativity," said OFSA President Brett Denning, who owns a funeral home in Strathroy. 

Funeral directors traditionally see obituaries written in a variety of ways, he said. Sometimes, families show up to the arrangement conference hours after a person has passed away with a document they've been working on for days or weeks or months. 

Other times, they are completely unable to contribute. That's when ChatGPT comes in handy — to help find the right words to express complex grief. 

AI can't consider nuance

The use of AI for obituaries is now "commonplace" for clients of O'Neil Funeral Home in London, Ont. It can be a good tool for inexperienced writers dealing with difficult emotions, said owner Joseph O'Neil. There are limitations, he added.   

Funeral directors are trained to sensitively catch certain unique details, like how many ex-wives a father may have or the order in which grandchildren were born. 

"AI doesn't handle things like that very well," said O'Neil, adding that religious beliefs can also be beyond the scope of the algorithm. 

"Sometimes the greatest conflicts between belief and value systems are within families themselves," he said. "Something that is very important to one group of people might be highly offensive to another group of people. And AI doesn't know that." 

That's why it's best to go over the obituary with a human funeral director before publishing, he said, regardless of whether or not the draft was used with the help of ChatGPT. 

"I think that it has to be as personalized as much as possible," said Paul Needham, owner of Westview and Northview Funeral Chapels in London. He's among a number of funeral directors who haven't yet worked with ChatGPT to write obituaries, but is open to the concept. 

"That means using proper terms of endearment. By way of example, grandchildren always referred to someone as 'Nanner.' They've all got different terms or even pet names and that has to be explored. I don't know that you'll achieve that through an AI-generated obituary." 

There hasn't been any specific software developed yet, said Denning, but there are "rumblings and lots of discussions" about what the future may hold for artificial intelligence and the funeral business. 

"We are an industry that takes a long time to change because we are safeguarding the needs of families," he said, adding that he doesn't expect to see a full scale transition to AI within the next year. 

"It will have to be a technology that has been vetted and that we have seen to be something that is very advantageous to the families we serve."