{"id":559,"date":"2025-02-03T18:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T19:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/?p=559"},"modified":"2025-02-20T14:55:34","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T14:55:34","slug":"should-you-let-chatgpt-write-your-grandmas-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/03\/should-you-let-chatgpt-write-your-grandmas-obituary\/","title":{"rendered":"Should you let ChatGPT write your grandma\u2019s obituary?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"An

<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn\u2019t know where to start. The grief wasn\u2019t helping either. \u201cI was just like, there’s no way I can do this,\u201d the 31-year-old from Los Angeles says.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, he\u2019d begun using OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, tinkering with the technology to create grocery lists and budgeting tools. What if it could help him with the obituary? King fed ChatGPT some details about his grandmother \u2014 she was a retired nurse who loved bowling and had a lot of grandkids \u2014 and asked it to write an obituary. <\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u201cI knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life,\u201d King says. \u201cIt didn’t matter that it was from ChatGPT.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

The result provided the scaffolding for one of life\u2019s most personal pieces of writing. King tweaked the language, added more details, and revised the obituary with the help of his mother. Ultimately, King felt ChatGPT helped him commemorate his grandmother with language that adequately expressed his emotions. \u201cI knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life,\u201d King, who works in video production for a luxury handbag company, says. \u201cIt didn’t matter that it was from ChatGPT.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generative AI has drastically changed the manner in which people communicate \u2014 and perceive communication. Early on, its uses proved relatively benign: Predictive text in iMessages<\/a> and Gmail<\/a> offered suggestions on word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase basis. But after the technological advances heralded by ChatGPT\u2019s public release in late 2022, the applications of the technology exploded. Users found AI helpful when writing emails and recommendation letters, and even to spruce up responses on dating apps<\/a>, as the number of chatbots available for experimentation also proliferated<\/a>. But there was also backlash: If a piece of writing appears insincere or stilted, receivers are quick to claim the author used AI<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, the AI chatbot content creep has gotten increasingly personal, with some leveraging it to craft wedding vows<\/a>, condolences<\/a>, breakup texts<\/a>, thank-you notes<\/a>, and, yes, obituaries. As people apply AI to considerably more heartfelt and genuine forms of communication, they run the risk of offending \u2014 or appearing grossly insincere\u00a0\u2014 if they are found out. Still, users say, AI isn\u2019t meant to manufacture sentimentality, but to provide a template onto which they can map their emotions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A gut check<\/h2>\n

As anyone who\u2019s been asked to give a speech or console a friend can attest, crafting the perfect message is notoriously difficult, especially if you\u2019re a first-timer. Because these communications are so personal and meant to evoke a specific response, the pressure\u2019s on to nail the tone. There\u2019s a thin line between an effective note of support and one that makes the recipient feel worse.<\/p>\n

AI tools, then, are particularly attractive in helping nervous scribes avoid a social blunder, offering a gut check to those who know how they feel but can\u2019t quite express it. \u201cIt’s a great way to sanity check yourself about your own intuition,\u201d says David Markowitz<\/a>, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University. \u201cIf you wanted to write an apology letter for some transgression, you can write that apology letter and then give it to ChatGPT or Claude and be like, \u2018I’m going for a warm and compassionate tone here. Am I right with this, or did I write this well?\u2019 And it could actually say, \u2018It reads a little cold to me. If I were you, I’d probably change a few words here,\u2019 and it will just make things better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generative AI platforms, of course, have not lived nor experienced emotions, but instead learn about them through scraping massive amounts of literature, psychological research, and other personal writing, Markowitz says. \u201cThis process is analogous to learning about a culture without experiencing it,\u201d he says, \u201cthrough the observation of behavioral patterns rather than direct experience.\u201d So while the tech doesn\u2019t understand feelings, per se, it can compare what you\u2019ve written to what it\u2019s learned about how people typically express their sentiments. <\/p>\n

Katie Hoffman, a 34-year-old marketer living in Philadelphia, sought ChatGPT\u2019s counsel on more than one occasion when broaching particularly sensitive conversations. In one instance, she used it to draft a text to a friend to tell her she wouldn\u2019t be attending her wedding. Another time, Hoffman and her sister prompted the chatbot to provide a diplomatic response to a friend who backed out of Hoffman\u2019s bachelorette party at the last minute but wanted her money back. \u201cHow do we say this without sounding like a jerk, but without making her feel bad?\u201d Hoffman says. \u201cIt would be able to give us the message that we crafted from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than overthink, over-explain, and send a disjointed message with too many details, Hoffman found ChatGPT\u2019s scripts more objective and precise than anything she could\u2019ve written on her own. She always workshopped and personalized the texts before sending them, she says, and her friends were none the wiser. <\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u201cI know what to say, but I have a hard time actually thinking about it and writing it out,\u201d Torres says. \u201cI don’t want it to sound silly. I don’t want it to sound like I’m not grateful.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

Ironically, the worse a chatbot performs and the more editing required, the more ownership the author takes over the message<\/a>, says Mor Naaman<\/a>, an information science professor at Cornell University. If you\u2019re not tweaking its output all that much, the less you feel like you really penned the message. \u201cThere might be implications for that as well: You’re feeling like a phony, you’re feeling like you cheated,\u201d Naaman says. <\/p>\n

But that hasn\u2019t stopped many people from trying out chatbots for sentimental communications. Grappling with a bout of writer\u2019s block, 26-year-old Gianna Torres used ChatGPT to outsource writing graduation party thank-you notes. \u201cI know what to say, but I have a hard time actually thinking about it and writing it out,\u201d the Philadelphia-based occupational therapist says. \u201cI don’t want it to sound silly. I don’t want it to sound like I’m not grateful.\u201d She prompted it to generate a heartfelt message expressing her thanks for commemorating the milestone. On the first try, ChatGPT spit out a beautiful, albeit long, letter, so she asked for a shorter version which she wrote verbatim into each card.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are like, \u2018ChatGPT has no emotions,\u2019\u201d Torres says, \u201cwhich is true, but the way it wrote the message, I feel it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Torres\u2019s friends and family initially had no inkling she had help writing the notes \u2014 that is, until her cousin saw a TikTok Torres posted about the workaround. Her cousin was surprised. Torres told her cousin the fact that she had help didn\u2019t negate how she felt; she just needed a little nudge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An unwelcome reception <\/h2>\n

While you may believe in your ability to spot AI-crafted language, the average person is pretty bad<\/a> at parsing whether a message was written by a chatbot. If you feed ChatGPT enough personal information, it can generate a convincing text, even more so if that text includes, or has been edited to include, statements using the words \u201cI,\u201d \u201cme,\u201d \u201cmyself,\u201d or \u201cmy.\u201d These words are one of the biggest markers of sincerity in language, according to Markowitz. \u201cThey help to indicate some sort of psychological closeness that people feel towards the thing they’re talking about,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

But if the recipient suspects the author outsourced their sincerity to AI, they don\u2019t<\/a> take it well<\/a>. \u201cAs soon as you suspect that some content is written by AI,\u201d Naaman says, \u201cyou find [the writer] less trustworthy. You think the communication is less successful.\u201d You can see this clearly in the backlash last summer to Google over its Olympics ad for its AI platform, Gemini: Audiences were appalled<\/a> that a father would turn to AI to help his daughter pen a fan letter to an Olympic athlete. As the technology continues to proliferate, audiences are increasingly skeptical of content that may seem off or too manufactured. <\/p>\n

\n
\n

If you aren\u2019t wrestling with the words to perfectly articulate your emotions, are they even real? Will you even remember how it all felt?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

The negative reaction to outsourcing writing that people find inherently emotional may stem from an overall skepticism toward the technology, as well as what its use means for sincerity, says Malte Jung<\/a>, an information science associate professor at Cornell University who studied the effects of AI in communication. \u201cPeople still hold a more negative perception of technology and AI and they might attribute that negative perception to the person using it,\u201d he says. (Over half of Americans consider AI a concern<\/a> rather than an exciting innovation, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center Survey.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jung says that people might think of AI-generated communications as \u201cless genuine, authentic, or sincere.\u201d If you aren\u2019t wrestling with the words to perfectly articulate your emotions, are they even real? Will you even remember how it all felt?\u00a0<\/p>\n

When King, who used ChatGPT to write his grandmother\u2019s obituary, relayed how he\u2019d used AI in a reply on X, the response was overwhelmingly negative. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d he says. The blowback prompted him to come clean to his mother, who assured him the obituary was \u201cbeautiful.\u201d \u201cIt really did make me second-think myself a little bit,\u201d King says. \u201cSomething that I never even thought was a bad thing, so many people tried to turn into a crazy, evil thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

When deliberating the ethics of AI communications, intentions do matter \u2014 to a certain extent. Who hasn\u2019t wracked their brain for the perfect mix of language and emotion? The desire to be warm and authentic and genuine could be enough to produce an effective message. \u201cThe key question is the effort people put in, the sincerity of what they want to write,\u201d Jung says. \u201cThat might be independent from how it is perceived. You used ChatGPT, then no matter if you’re sincere in what you put in, people might still see you negatively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generative AI is becoming so ubiquitous, however, that some may not care at all. <\/p>\n

Chris Harihar, a 39-year-old who works in public relations in New York City, had a specific childhood anecdote he wanted to include in his speech at his sister\u2019s wedding but couldn\u2019t quite weave it in. So he asked ChatGPT for some help. He uploaded his speech in its current form, told it the story he was aiming to incorporate, and asked it to connect the story to lifelong partnership. \u201cIt was able to give me these threads that I hadn’t thought of before where it made total sense,\u201d Harihar says.<\/p>\n

Harihar was an early adopter of AI and uses platforms like Claude and ChatGPT frequently in his personal and professional life, so his family wasn\u2019t surprised when he told them he used AI to perfect the speech. <\/p>\n

Harihar even uses AI tools to answer his 4-year-old daughter\u2019s perplexing, ultra-specific questions that are characteristic of kids. Recently, Harihar\u2019s daughter wondered why people have different skin tones and he prompted ChatGPT to offer a kid-friendly explanation. The bot provided a diplomatic and age-appropriate breakdown of melanin. Harihar was impressed \u2014 he probably wouldn\u2019t have thought to break it down that way, he says. Rather than feel like he lost out on a parenting moment by outsourcing help, Harihar sees the technology as another resource.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a parenting perspective, sometimes you’re just trying to survive the day,\u201d he says. \u201cHaving one of these tools available to you to help make explanations that you otherwise might struggle with for whatever reason are helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn\u2019t know where to start. The grief wasn\u2019t helping either. \u201cI was just like, there’s no way I can do this,\u201d the 31-year-old from Los Angeles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}