On October 5, Gray Media stations across the country carried a story out of Lexington, Kentucky, about a father who went looking for his son’s obituary and found several he had never seen before. Noah Tinch died one day before his nineteenth birthday, and while his family was still finalizing funeral arrangements, anonymous obituaries for him were already circulating online, one listing his age as 32 and another getting his middle name wrong.
What the Tinch family found online
Nobody who wrote those obituaries knew Noah. According to the WKYT report, they were posted anonymously, some of them from overseas, on low-quality sites that publish in volume and are built to catch search traffic. His father, Brett Tinch, ended up correcting the record himself in public, which meant saying out loud to strangers what had actually happened to his son so that a true version of it would exist somewhere findable.
I have spent two years building tools that help families write obituaries, and I still read that story twice. Not because the technology surprised me, but because of the timing. The fake notices were up before the real one was. The family was in the first forty-eight hours, the part where you are mostly making phone calls and signing forms, and the internet had already decided what Noah’s life was going to look like to anyone who searched his name.
Why anyone would write an obituary for a stranger
There is no mystery in the motive, and that is almost the worst part of it. Dr. Lisa Blue, who directs artificial intelligence strategies at Eastern Kentucky University, told WKYT that these pages face no consequences for being wrong, and that the strange, slightly-off details actually help: an obituary with an error in it gets clicks, and clicks earn ad revenue for whoever posted it. A death notice is cheap to generate, it ranks quickly because nobody else has published yet, and the people most likely to find it are the least likely to have the energy to fight it.
So the incentive is not to be accurate. The incentive is to be first. AI writing tools made the cost of being first drop to almost nothing, which is why a nineteen-year-old in Kentucky had multiple obituaries before his family had one.
The second wave is people reading the details
The fake pages are one problem, but the real obituary creates a different exposure, and it is worth understanding before you write one. ConsumerAffairs reported in September on scammers using AI to scan published obituaries and build personalized approaches from what they find there. In the case it described, a widow lost more than 7,000 dollars to callers who claimed they had helped her late husband hide tax evasion and that she needed to pay to protect her inheritance. They had found her through her husband’s obituary.
Look at what a traditional obituary contains and you can see why it works. A spouse’s full name. Children and grandchildren by name. The hometown. Former employers. Schools. Military service. A church or a lodge or a union. Those are the details that make an obituary worth reading, and they are also, read differently, a profile: the answers to half the security questions a bank would ask, and more than enough for a caller to sound like someone who knew the family.
This is not an argument for publishing nothing. An obituary that is stripped down to initials and dates is not protecting anyone, it is just a smaller loss. It is an argument for making a few decisions on purpose rather than filling in a template at the worst possible moment.
Publish the real one first
The practical advice from the WKYT story is the simplest version of the right answer, and it is the one I would give anyone: get the real obituary published early, on a source people trust, and then make that the only link anyone shares.
Early matters because search engines reward whatever exists. If the funeral home’s site, the local paper, or a memorial page carries the real notice within the first day or two, it has a head start on the generated ones, and friends who go looking will land on it instead. Trusted matters because a verified page is the thing a family can point to when a relative calls and asks about the version they read, which said something wrong. And one link matters because fifteen different versions shared across fifteen group chats is exactly the confusion these sites feed on. Dr. Blue’s guidance was to ask friends and family to circulate only the official link, which sounds small and is not.
If you do find a fabricated obituary for someone you love, you can report it to the site that hosts it and to the search engines that surface it, and plenty of families have had results that way. If someone is making money off a dead person’s name and image, that may also be worth a conversation with an estate attorney in your state, because the law on a deceased person’s name and likeness varies a great deal depending on where you are.
What to decide before you are deciding it at 2am
Almost everything above is easier if some of it is written down in advance. Not the obituary itself necessarily, though plenty of people do write their own and it is a gift when they have. Mostly the small decisions underneath it: whether you want your middle name and birth date in print, which relatives get named and which get a general mention, whether the house you grew up in and the company you retired from belong in the public version, who in the family has the authority to approve the final text and post it.
Those are twenty minutes of conversation at a kitchen table on an ordinary Tuesday. They are an impossible conversation on the day someone dies, which is when families currently have it, usually by committee, usually over the phone, usually with a funeral director waiting on a deadline. The reason fake obituaries get a head start is not that families are careless. It is that the first version of a person’s story gets written during the worst week of everyone’s life.
That is the gap we built Scribe for. It helps a family draft an obituary quickly, in their own words, with the details they chose ahead of time rather than the ones they can remember under pressure, and it publishes to a Monument memorial page that gives everyone a single real link to share. Being first should not be a thing strangers are better at than families.