AI-written eulogies: funeral workers hear the emptiness

According to Libération, funeral workers confide their sadness: at services, tributes to the deceased are being drained of their humanity, because they are more and more often written with artificial intelligence. In the paper's headline, one of them sums it up: "it sounds very hollow". We have no figures, at this stage, on the scale of the phenomenon or the tools used; the rest of this piece is our reading, not an established finding.

Let us begin by not lecturing grieving families. Writing a eulogy when you have just lost someone is a cruel exercise: little time, few words, a great deal of shock. Reaching for help is perfectly human. The question, then, is not "why are these people cheating?" but "why has a ready-made tears machine become the obvious solution?"

This is where common sense, in Gramsci's sense, becomes interesting. A ruling class is hegemonic when its worldview stops presenting itself as a view and simply becomes "the normal way of doing things". Now the idea that every text is a problem of efficiency, that wording is a chore to be delegated, is settling in little by little, including at the bedside of the dead. The gesture seems neutral, practical, reasonable. Nobody imposes it; we consent to it, one "generate" at a time.

This consent has an owner. Language models belong to a handful of companies that control, to borrow an old Marxist formula, the means of mental production. They are not selling grief, but they are selling the form of grief: the correct sentence, the smoothed-over memory, the average anecdote. Hence the "hollowness" that funeral workers describe. A eulogy lives on clumsiness, on the detail that would be of use to nobody else, on the family joke. The statistical average of all possible eulogies is the eulogy of nobody.

One can see in this a widespread form of alienation: separated from their labour, workers were already separated from its products; now each person is separated from their own mourning, from the effort of searching for the words that, precisely, do the work of separation. Funeral workers, for their part, are in the front row. They have trained ears, they hear hundreds of ceremonies, and their testimony carries the weight of trade knowledge: they are, if you like, organic intellectuals of ritual, whom nobody consulted before the machines were deployed.

We must keep a sense of proportion: no tool manufactures pain, and nothing says that all these texts are worthless to those who read them. But a society that finds it natural to outsource its farewells has perhaps already lost a broader battle, that of the institutions where we learn to speak. A modest counter-hegemony: writing workshops, time given to families, clumsy words. It will not scale. That is precisely the point.