AI-generated fake obituaries falsely reported Brian Vastag's death
After Beth Mazur passed away in December 2023, AI-generated spam obituaries appeared across multiple websites, falsely claiming that Brian Vastag had also died. The inaccurate articles ranked highly in Google search results, leading at least four mutual friends to believe Vastag had died. Vastag reported the pages to Google, which responded that they did not violate its policies. The obituary spam sites use AI tools to produce low-quality content monetised through ads.
- Date it happened
- 2023-12-01
- Organisation involved
- Multiple spam websites including Eternal Honoring, In Loving Memories News, The Thaiger, and FreshersLive
This incident was imported from theverge.com. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.