Writing a loved one's obituary can be a real honor and also a serious challenge.

You're trying to capture the essence of a person's whole life and their effect on the world

in just a few short paragraphs.

No matter how well we knew and cared about someone, we might wonder whether our writing skills

are up to the task. Would you trust AI to get it right? From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris

Boyd. Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for The Washington Post, and recently he's been looking

into a new frontier for AI companies, programming platforms that turn prompts about someone's

life history into cohesive, respectful pieces of writing so we can share those stories with

anyone who might be interested.

If you find it surprising that such a sensitive task might be left

up to a computer, here's a fact that might knock you over. You have almost certainly already read

some obituaries created by machines. His article about this is titled The Rise of AI Tools that

Write About You When You Die. Drew, welcome to think. Thank you for having me. You talked to a guy named Jeff Fargo

who wanted to write a really nice obituary when his mom died, but emotionally he didn't,

what, feel like he was in a good place to do this and do it well? Yeah, it was really soon after

his mom had died. He was emotionally raw. He was, you know, as anybody who's lost a parent or loved one knows, feeling very overwhelmed by the grief of it and the logistics of it.

And the, her friends were asking him about an obituary. And he basically turned to

chat GPT and asked it in, you know, the way people ask chat GPT, he said, I want an obituary to

memorialize my mom. He told me that he typed for a really long time into the box trying to tell Chatchipat

ET all about her so it could kind of capture the nuance of who she was.

And then he hit the button and outspit this obituary.

And he showed me how it looked and it was printed in, you know, her home's

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