The Unsettling Scourge of Obituary Spam (theverge.com) 39
Many websites are using AI tools to generate fake obituaries about average people for profit. These articles lack substantiating details but are optimized for SEO, frequently outranking legitimate obituaries, The Verge reports. The fake obituaries, as one can imagine, are causing distress for grieving families and friends. In response, Google told The Verge that it aims to surface high-quality information but struggles with "data voids." The company terminated some YouTube channels sharing fake notices but declined to say if the flagged websites violate policies.
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It's fascinating how you guys let him live rent-free in your heads for years and years.
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Re:BIZX (Score:4, Insightful)
For all of /.'s faults, they've never pasted billboards over my grandfather's grave. Context and degree are pretty important when it comes to accusations of hypocrisy.
Glad you told us (Score:5, Interesting)
I was trying to figure out how putting out fake obituaries, other than being a nuisance, was spam until I read the article. For those who were also wondering, the sites in question are loaded with ads.
It shouldn't be too difficult for Google to weed these sites out based on their weird names. But then, being human, it's easy for me to see this spam. Not so much for the vaunted software. Maybe AI can finally do something useful and demote/remove this stuff.
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I didn't get as far as you, because I couldn't get past bemusement at the juxtaposition of "obituaries" with "average people".
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Google's entire business is based around pushing ads at you. I don't think they're going to spend a huge amount of money reducing the amount of ads they can push at you.
Friends of Privacy (Score:3, Funny)
Might this be viewed as a victory for privacy? The more noise and incorrect info about you out there, the better.
I died. Then I died again. I'm alleged to have died so many times, nobody knows whether or not I'm still alive.
Re:Friends of Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Reports of your death can potentially result in termination of licenses and insurance policies, closure of bank accounts, and even result in termination of both employment and right to work. There have even been cases of people losing their homes.
https://www.theguardian.com/li... [theguardian.com]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wor... [bbc.co.uk]
These are two particularly bad cases. In the first, the woman spent years (with no access to healthcare or bank accounts) legally dead on the basis of a rumour.
In the second case, an Ohio man who fled overwhelming debt and declared legally dead is ineligible to be declared alive because more than three years had passed.
The consequences of this kind of false reporting is that such incidents can only become more common. It's quite possible for a man whose wife is the breadwinner might never need to access bank accounts of drive a car for three years. A false report of death negligently acted upon would utterly destroy that person's life.
Privacy is good, but not if the consequence is that you're never eligible for anything, medical care included.
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Copy ... paste ... edit.
Will the tax-man believe me? Particularly if I report my death in a boating accident in Nauru?
Prior Coverage (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Prior Coverage (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just a continuation of the flooding of "science" content on YouTube by dozens of AI channels where they just get headlines, use an AI voice and some stock image and stick it in a video.
The sole goal is to generate 10+ videos a day. Do this across hundreds of channels and you can make a decent living for doing nothing. YouTube might only pay a penny for a hundred views, but if you can get a dozen views on 50 videos you posted that day you might make a nickle. Do it for a few hundred channels and you've got a few bucks. And the total effort is basically zero since it's just a computer getting some news report and using cheap TTS software and AI bots to generate the videos.
It's worse than that [Re:Prior Coverage] (Score:1)
Wired published a story about this [wired.com] back in September.
That Wired story was a slightly less awful version, where the spam is human beings reading obituaries of people who actually had died. The article here [theverge.com] is about a new variant that's an order of magnitude worse, garbage made up by an AI declaring the death about people who are still alive.
(and I still get the text message version, an even earlier spamming variant with the same hook: messages that say nothing other than "Did you see who just died?? Didn't you know them?" plus a malware link.)
How many people have to piss in the pool (Score:5, Informative)
until it's no longer a pool but a sewer?
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Well, at least CowboyNeal hasn't been "killed" yet (Score:1)
Did you mean: "Cowboy Neal" "obituary"
It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
Data Void (Score:3)
It doesn't take too much to fix, doesn't cost too much. Establishing a business listing on Google, maybe Bing, and Apple Maps is a good start. A rudimentary web site with at least contact info and hours. Yelp helps too since if you don't create a page one will likely be created. Now and then some bogus info leaks through, but it can be corrected quickly if you've established yourself as the business owner.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that bogus obits get shown if there is no "official" one. If someone searches for something, low-quality results should drop down on the list. If there are no high-quality ones then all you get are the dregs.
Perhaps the various search engines need to show a quality level next to the results. Then crap that would normally show up on page 3 won't look great by virtue of not having any results that would normally be on pages 1 & 2.
Not Much You Can Do (Score:2)
Over and over we're faced with the simple reality that a certain percentage of the population are one or more of: stupid, crooked, amoral, evil. Not a complete list of course...
I don't think the distribution of these people has changed. But... we've put the tools that enable communication to the entire world in the hands of "everybody". And these people are disproportionately represented in the group that will most immediately take advantage of those tools.
I've been on the fence for 20 years as to whether o
I've always wondered if it would be possible to (Score:2)
It's clear that this is the mechanic that has to go.