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‘A marker of luxury and arrogance': why gravity-defying boobs are back – and what they say about the state of the world
‘A marker of luxury and arrogance': why gravity-defying boobs are back – and what they say about the state of the world

The Guardian

time8 hours ago

  • Entertainment
  • The Guardian

‘A marker of luxury and arrogance': why gravity-defying boobs are back – and what they say about the state of the world

It was, almost, a proud feminist moment. On inauguration day in January, the unthinkable happened. President Trump, the biggest ego on the planet, was upstaged by a woman in a white trouser suit – the proud uniform of Washington feminists, worn by Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in solidarity with the traditional colour of the suffragettes. In the event, the white trouser suit barely got a mention. The show was stolen by what was underneath: Lauren Sánchez's cleavage, cantilevered under a wisp of white lace. The breasts of the soon-to-be Mrs Jeff Bezos were the ceremony's breakout stars. The only talking point that came close was Mark Zuckerberg's inability to keep his eyes off them. Call it a curtain raiser for a year in which breasts have been – how to put this? – in your face. Sydney Sweeney's pair have upstaged her acting career to the point that she wears a sweatshirt that says 'Sorry for Having Great Tits and Correct Opinions'. Bullet bras are making a sudden comeback, in sugar-pink silk on Dua Lipa on the cover of British Vogue and nosing keen as shark fins under fine cashmere sweaters at the Miu Miu show at Paris fashion week. Perhaps most tellingly, Kim Kardashian, whose body is her business empire, has made a 180-degree pivot from monetising her famous backside to selling, in her Skims lingerie brand, push-up bras featuring a pert latex nipple – with or without a fake piercing – that make an unmissable point under your T-shirt. Not since Eva Herzigova was in her Wonderbra in 1994 – Hello Boys – have boobs been so, well, big. It is oddly tricky to discuss boobs without sounding as if you are in a doctor's surgery or a fraternity house. The word breasts is rather formal. Boobs is fond and familiar, which feels right, but sniggery, which doesn't. Bosoms are what you see in period dramas. Knockers, jugs, melons, hooters, fun bags? Whatever we call them, they are full of contradictions. Men see them and think of sex; babies see them and think of food. They contain a liquid without which the human race could not until recently have survived, but they are also one of the most tumour-prone parts of the body. You can admire them in the Uffizi, the Louvre and the National Gallery, but they are banned on Instagram (Free the nipple!). They are nursing Madonnas, and they are Madonna in a conical bra. They are topless goddesses and top shelf; entirely natural yet extremely rude; and they are, right now, absolutely everywhere. There is a whole lot going on here. In America, the impact of the Trump administration is going way beyond policy, reshaping culture at a granular level. The Maga ruling class has a thirst for busty women in tight clothes, which fuses something new – what Zuckerberg has called 'masculine energy' – with nostalgia for 1950s America. (The 'again' in Make America Great Again may not have a date stamp, but it comes with a white picket fence.) As a symbol of fertility, full breasts are catnip to a regime obsessed with breeding and keen to limit reproductive freedoms. Boobs are in the eye of the storm of the current gender fluidity rollback, too. Nothing says boys will be boys and women should look like women more than Bezos's Popeye biceps next to Sánchez's lace-edged curves. They used to say that a picture was worth a thousand words; in today's ultra-visual culture, that rate of exchange has steepened. The fact that a culture that was, until a few years ago, sensitively exploring gender as a complex issue has now regressed to the level of teenage boys watching American Pie for the first time says everything about how things have changed. Since 1962, when Timmie Jean Lindsey, a mother of six from Texas, became the first woman in the world to have silicone implants, breasts have been a lightning rod for the battleground between what is real and what is fake. The debate that catapulted Pamela Anderson to fame in the 1990s has become one of the defining issues of our time. It turns out that breasts, and beauty, were just the start. Artificial intelligence has jumped the conversation on. From Mountainhead to Black Mirror, we are now talking not just about real boobs v fake ones but about real brains v fake ones. In the battle between old-school flesh and blood and the prospect of a new, possibly improved, version of the human race, breasts have been leading the culture for 63 years. In a nutshell, the world is losing its mind over the girls. 'The State of the Union is … boobs' was the New York Post's succinct verdict on the charms of Sweeney, while Amy Hamm wrote in the National Post that they were 'double-D harbingers of the death of woke'. On inauguration day, onlookers were divided between outrage at an inappropriate level of nudity and admiration for how Sánchez's 'Latina auntie' energy showed her, um, balls. All of which makes it a weird time to have breasts. When writer Emma Forrest saw the author portrait taken for the jacket of her new novel, Father Figure, her first thought was, 'Oh wow, my boobs look huge.' She is wearing a plain black T-shirt, 'so that must be OK, right? It's not like I'm wearing a corset. I feel I should be allowed to have people review my books without having an issue with my boobs. But who knows.' Breasts have always had the power to undermine women. After a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, Sarah Thornton found herself with much bigger breasts than she had wanted – having asked for 'lesbian yoga boobs', she woke up with D cups – and wrote her book, Tits Up, to make peace with her 'silicone impostors' by investigating their cultural history. Breasts, she writes, are 'visible obstacles to equality, associated with nature and nurture rather than reason and power'. Since she was a teenager, Forrest has lived with 'the assumption that having big breasts means being messy, being sexually wild, having no emotional volume control. I have had to learn to separate my own identity from what other people read on to my body.' It's Messy: On Boys, Boobs and Badass Women is the title of Amanda de Cadenet's memoir, in which she writes about developing into 'the teenage girl whose body made grown women uncomfortable and men salivate', recalling the destabilising experience of having a body that brought her overnight success – she was a presenter on The Word at 18 – while simultaneously somehow making her the butt of every joke. If the length of our skirts speaks to the stock market – short hemlines in boom times, long when things are bad – breasts are political. Thirty years after the French Revolution, Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People with a lifesize, bare-breasted Liberty hoisting the French flag, leading her people to freedom. A century and a half later, women burning their bras at the 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant became one of the defining images of the feminist movement – never mind the fact that it never happened. (Protesters threw copies of Playboy, and some bras, in a trash can, but starting a fire on a sidewalk was illegal.) Intriguingly, decades when big breasts are in fashion seem to coincide with times of regression for women. Think about it. The 1920s: flat-chested flapper dresses and emancipation. The 1950s: Jayne Mansfield and women being pushed away from the workplace and back into the home. The 1970s: lean torsos under T-shirts, and the women's liberation movement. Sarah Shotton started out as an assistant in Agent Provocateur's raunchy flagship store in Soho, London, in 1999, when she was 24, and rose to become creative director of the lingerie brand in 2010. Her 15 years in charge have seen Agent Provocateur rocked by the changing tides of sexual politics. In 2017, the year #MeToo hit the headlines, the company went into administration, before finding a new distributor. Shotton says, 'I have always loved sexy bras, and it's what we are known for. But there was a time when it felt like that wasn't OK. Soon after #MeToo, we had a campaign lined up to shoot and the phone started ringing with all the agents of the women who were supposed to be in it, pulling their clients out, saying they didn't want to be seen in that way.' But the brand's revenues have doubled in the past three years. 'Last year we shot a film with Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch, where she's in really sexy lingerie and he's playing pool. I remember saying, 'This is either going to go down like a ton of bricks or people are going to love it.'' It seems as if they loved it: the company's sales are expected to hit £50m this year. 'I think a younger generation now want what we had in the 1990s and 2000s,' Shotton says, 'because it looks like we had more fun. My generation of women had childhood on our BMX bikes, then when we were in our 20s, your job finished when you left the office and you could go out drinking all night if you wanted to. I think we really did have more fun. Life just didn't feel as complicated as it does now.' The bestselling bras, she says, are currently 'anything plunging and push-up. Racy stuff. Our Nikita satin bra, which is like a shelf for your boobs and only just covers your nipples.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The legacy of the 1990s, when feminism and raunch became bedfellows, has left the world confused about breasts. Before that, the lines were pretty simple – the flappers throwing off their corsets, the feminists protesting over Page 3. But Liz Goldwyn, film-maker and sociologist (and granddaughter of Samuel Goldwyn Jr), whose first job was in a Planned Parenthood clinic and who collects vintage lingerie, doesn't fit neatly into any of the old categories. 'Third-wave feminists like myself grew up in the riot grrrl and burlesque days, where we embraced corsets and kink along with liberation and protest,' she says. Goldwyn collects, loves and wears vintage lingerie, while abhorring Spanx. 'I would rather go to the dentist than wear shapewear, but I find nothing more satisfying than to colour-coordinate my lingerie drawers.' Wearing a corset, she says, 'makes me breathe with more presence'. Breasts have always been about money and class as well as sex and gender. The Tudor gentlewomen who wore dresses cut to expose their small, pert breasts were proudly indicating they had the means to afford a wet nurse. Sánchez's inauguration outfit – tiny white Alexander McQueen trouser suit, lots of gravity-defying cleavage – 'taps into the fact that people who are that wealthy can have the impossible,' Forrest says. 'It is pretty difficult to have a super-slim body and big breasts. Her body is a physical manifestation of something much bigger, which is the hyper-wealthy living in a different reality to the rest of us. The planet might be doomed, but they can go to space. It's a 'fuck you' marker of luxury and arrogance.' The vibe, Goldwyn agrees, 'is very dystopian 1980s Dynasty meets 'let them eat cake'. I would never disparage another woman's body, but I have no problem disparaging her principles … in claiming to stand for women's empowerment, yet attending an inauguration for an administration that has rolled back reproductive freedoms.' Surgery – the blunt fact of boobs being a thing you can buy – has crystallised the idea of breasts as femininity's biggest commercial hit. (They are at times referred to, after all, as prize assets.) The primitive – survival of the fittest, in the thirsty sense of the word – is now turbocharged by enlargement is the most popular cosmetic surgery in the UK, with 5,202 procedures carried out in 2024, according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. When Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor interviewed women in 2010 about their experiences of breast augmentation for her research into the sociology of cosmetic surgery, 'a lot of young women told me they were doing it for status'. Not to show off, but to show 'they had made it. They felt they were being good citizens: going out there and making money, but also wanting to play the part of being feminine.' Breasts, Sanchez Taylor says, 'say everything about who a woman is: about femininity and fertility, class and age.' They are at the centre of the industrial complex that has grown up around female beauty. 'I remember sitting in a consultation with a woman and her surgeon, and him saying cheerfully, 'Oh yes, you've got fried egg breasts. But we can fix that.'' Fake is no longer scandalous or transgressive. The vocabulary of plastic surgery has been gentled and mainstreamed to become the more palatable cosmetic surgery. The older women of the Kardashian family have been coy about having had work, but 27-year-old Kylie Jenner recently shared on social media the details of her breast surgery – down to the implant size, placement and name of surgeon. Unreal is here to stay, and the new battle line is between perfection and imperfection. The generation growing up now, who have never seen a celebrity portrait that wasn't retouched, have never used a camera that doesn't have filters, take 20 selfies and delete 19 of them, have an intolerance of imperfection. To put it bluntly: normal looks weird to them. So it seems natural – even if it isn't really natural – that celebrity boobs are getting bigger even as celebrity bodies are getting smaller. 'We are in a really weird place with the body, particularly in America,' says Emma McClendon, assistant professor of fashion studies at St John's University in New York, who in 2017 curated the New York exhibition The Body: Fashion and Physique. 'What we are seeing now is definitely not about the bigger body. It is a very controlled mode of curviness, which emphasises a tiny waist.' (Very 1950s coded, again.) 'GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are having a cultural impact on all of us, whether or not you or people you know are on them,' McClendon says. 'The incredible shrinking of the celebrity body that is happening in America is creating this idea that your body is endlessly fixable and tweakable.' Hairlines can be regrown, fat melted, wrinkles erased. For most of the past half-century, fashion has held out against boobs. With a few notable exceptions – Vivienne Westwood, rest her soul, adored a corset-hoisted embonpoint – modern designers have mostly ignored them. Karl Lagerfeld insisted his models should glissade, ballerina style, and disliked any curves that veered from his clean, elongated lines. And yet in the past 12 months, the bullet bra has come back. A star turn on the Miu Miu catwalk was presaged last year by a cameo in the video for Charli xcx's 360, worn by photographer and model Richie Shazam, and by influencer and singer Addison Rae, whose lilac velvet corset creamed into two striking Mr Whippy peaks at a Young Hollywood party last summer. To seal the revival, none other than the queen of fashion – Kate Moss – wore a bullet bra under her Donna Karan dress in a viral fashion shoot with Ray Winstone for a recent issue of Perfect magazine. Perhaps the bullet bra, which can be seen as weaponising the breast, is perfect for now. 'Fashion is the body, and clothes turn the body into a language,' McClendon says. The bullet bra is steeped in a time when 'domestic femininity was repackaged as glamour', Forrest says. 'A postwar era, coming back from scarcity and lack and hunger, when Sophia Loren was sold as a kind of delicious luxury truffle.' Goldwyn is a fan. 'A perfectly seamed bullet bra lifts my spirits (and my breasts) if I am in a foul mood,' she says. 'I hope we can reclaim it as symbolic of resistance, defiance and armour.' In the backstage scrum with reporters after she had made bullet bras the centrepiece of her Miu Miu catwalk show, Miuccia Prada said the collection was about 'femininity', then she corrected herself: 'No – femininities.' Prada has been using her clothes to articulate the complexities of living and performing femininity for decades, and this season it led her to the bullet bra. 'What do we need, in this difficult moment for women – to lift us up?' she laughed, gesturing upwards with her hands, surrounded by pointy-chested models. 'It's like a new fashion. I think the girls are excited.' Half a millennium after Leonardo da Vinci painted the Madonna Litta, his 1490 painting of the Virgin Mary baring her right breast to feed Christ, which now hangs in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, another Madonna found her breasts in the spotlight. In the late 1980s, Jean Paul Gaultier was experimenting with conical bras in his Paris shows. 'He took inspiration from his grandmother's structured undergarments,' says fashion historian Amber Butchart, 'and used them to herald self-liberation. I don't generally like the word empowering – it doesn't tend to mean much – but that was very much the idea.' In 1989, while Madonna was preparing for her 1990 Blond Ambition world tour, she phoned Gaultier and asked him to design the wardrobe. On the opening night, in Japan, Madonna tore off her black blazer to reveal that iconic baby-pink satin corset with conical cups. 'Do you believe in love? Well, I've got something to say about it,' she declared, before launching into Express Yourself. The silhouette, which could be seen all the way from the cheap seats, would end up scandalising the pope and costing the world's biggest female pop star a lucrative Pepsi deal. Boobs have always been good at capturing our attention, and they have it right now. Hello again, boys.

Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing
Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing

Washington Post

time4 days ago

  • Washington Post

Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing

A woman charged in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont is due in federal court Tuesday in one of multiple criminal cases linked to a cultlike group known as Zizians . Authorities have said Teresa Youngblut fired the bullet that killed agent David Maland during the January traffic stop. Another agent fired back, wounding Youngblut and killing her companion, Felix Bauckholt, officials have said. The Zizians are a group of followers of Jack LaSota , a computer scientist who has blogged as 'Ziz' on subjects including veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence. The group mostly consists of computer scientists who met online, shared anarchist beliefs and became increasingly violent. Youngblut and Bauckholt were both affiliated with the group, which authorities have also linked to killings in Pennsylvania and California. Youngblut has pleaded not guilty to charges of intentionally using a deadly weapon towards law enforcement, and using and discharging a firearm during an assault with a deadly weapon. The Tuesday federal court appearance is a discovery hearing in Burlington. Discovery is a pre-trial proceeding in which both sides of a case exchange evidence and information. Both sides declined to comment in advance of the court date. The office of Steven Barth, who has represented Youngblut, said it had no comment on the case. Fabienne Boisvert-DeFazio, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Vermont, said the office 'does not comment on ongoing cases beyond the public record.' In Vermont, authorities had been watching Youngblut for several days after she and Bauckholt checked into a hotel wearing black tactical gear and carrying guns. Local border patrol agents also were told that Bauckholt was a German citizen with unknown immigration status. Authorities said Youngblut shot Maland after being pulled over. The shootout was one of several violent incidents that has been linked to the Zizians. Members of the group have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on California landlord Curtis Lind in 2022, Lind's subsequent killing, and the deaths of a Pennsylvania couple.

Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing
Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing

The Independent

time4 days ago

  • The Independent

Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing

A woman charged in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont is due in federal court Tuesday in one of multiple criminal cases linked to a cultlike group known as Zizians. Authorities have said Teresa Youngblut fired the bullet that killed agent David Maland during the January traffic stop. Another agent fired back, wounding Youngblut and killing her companion, Felix Bauckholt, officials have said. The Zizians are a group of followers of Jack LaSota, a computer scientist who has blogged as 'Ziz' on subjects including veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence. The group mostly consists of computer scientists who met online, shared anarchist beliefs and became increasingly violent. Youngblut and Bauckholt were both affiliated with the group, which authorities have also linked to killings in Pennsylvania and California. Youngblut has pleaded not guilty to charges of intentionally using a deadly weapon towards law enforcement, and using and discharging a firearm during an assault with a deadly weapon. The Tuesday federal court appearance is a discovery hearing in Burlington. Discovery is a pre-trial proceeding in which both sides of a case exchange evidence and information. Both sides declined to comment in advance of the court date. The office of Steven Barth, who has represented Youngblut, said it had no comment on the case. Fabienne Boisvert-DeFazio, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Vermont, said the office 'does not comment on ongoing cases beyond the public record.' In Vermont, authorities had been watching Youngblut for several days after she and Bauckholt checked into a hotel wearing black tactical gear and carrying guns. Local border patrol agents also were told that Bauckholt was a German citizen with unknown immigration status. Authorities said Youngblut shot Maland after being pulled over. The shootout was one of several violent incidents that has been linked to the Zizians. Members of the group have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on California landlord Curtis Lind in 2022, Lind's subsequent killing, and the deaths of a Pennsylvania couple.

Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing
Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing

Associated Press

time4 days ago

  • Associated Press

Woman with ties to a cultlike group to appear in court after border agent's killing

A woman charged in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont is due in federal court Tuesday in one of multiple criminal cases linked to a cultlike group known as Zizians. Authorities have said Teresa Youngblut fired the bullet that killed agent David Maland during the January traffic stop. Another agent fired back, wounding Youngblut and killing her companion, Felix Bauckholt, officials have said. The Zizians are a group of followers of Jack LaSota, a computer scientist who has blogged as 'Ziz' on subjects including veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence. The group mostly consists of computer scientists who met online, shared anarchist beliefs and became increasingly violent. Youngblut and Bauckholt were both affiliated with the group, which authorities have also linked to killings in Pennsylvania and California. Youngblut has pleaded not guilty to charges of intentionally using a deadly weapon towards law enforcement, and using and discharging a firearm during an assault with a deadly weapon. The Tuesday federal court appearance is a discovery hearing in Burlington. Discovery is a pre-trial proceeding in which both sides of a case exchange evidence and information. Both sides declined to comment in advance of the court date. The office of Steven Barth, who has represented Youngblut, said it had no comment on the case. Fabienne Boisvert-DeFazio, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Vermont, said the office 'does not comment on ongoing cases beyond the public record.' In Vermont, authorities had been watching Youngblut for several days after she and Bauckholt checked into a hotel wearing black tactical gear and carrying guns. Local border patrol agents also were told that Bauckholt was a German citizen with unknown immigration status. Authorities said Youngblut shot Maland after being pulled over. The shootout was one of several violent incidents that has been linked to the Zizians. Members of the group have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on California landlord Curtis Lind in 2022, Lind's subsequent killing, and the deaths of a Pennsylvania couple.

Digital Grave-Robbing: How AI Is Plundering Online Obituaries
Digital Grave-Robbing: How AI Is Plundering Online Obituaries

CNET

time6 days ago

  • Health
  • CNET

Digital Grave-Robbing: How AI Is Plundering Online Obituaries

My sister had only been gone for a few hours and the AI afterlife had already devoured her. Jamie went into the hospital with stomach pain on a Friday last January. By Tuesday morning, she had passed away from an aggressive lymphoma at 36. Later that afternoon, my mom got a text about a suspicious obituary my aunt saw online. The errors jumped out immediately. Her cause of death was listed as autism. The obituary chronicled a funeral that hadn't happened yet. The loss was described as saddening "the entire music community." In other ways, it was eerily accurate. Jamie did have an optimistic spirit and a dedication to helping others. She was a "particular person," whatever that meant. It alluded constantly to health issues, which the obituary "writer" seemed to think had something to do with autism. Jamie had a stroke when she was 15, which left her with a limp and a speech impediment. Is that what it meant? It was like looking at Jamie through a funhouse mirror — these core facts about her were so intimate, but they'd been stretched and distorted beyond recognition. "I was furious," my mom said when I asked her what she remembered about that initial discovery. "We wanted to tell her story. And before we even had a chance to do anything, it's already out there." This was my introduction to a process that repeats itself every time someone dies and loved ones post about them on social media — primarily Facebook. Comments are harvested as raw materials for obituaries written by AI, and dozens of bots share links to them back on Facebook. But it didn't stop there. We Googled Jamie's name to see if anything else was out there, found a handful of similar AI obit pages, as well as several YouTube videos reading fake obituaries with an AI voiceover while a still image of a car accident or a candle loomed ominously. They've since been taken down, but I'll never forget clicking seemingly endless links to AI memorials of Jamie. Someone dies roughly every 10 seconds in America. In 2024, 1.9 million were cremated, 1 million were buried and 156,000 were donated to science, entombed or removed by the state, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. One survey from the obituary site Beyond the Dash found that 65% of the country wants to have an obituary written about them when they pass. What the survey didn't say was who they'd like it to be written by. In today's world, it's become commonplace for AI to do the writing. Since ChatGPT burst on the scene in late 2022, people have increasingly been using generative AI to write emails, craft school essays and summarize complex documents. Google makes its Gemini AI tool almost inescapable in Gmail and Google Docs. At this point, 500 million people use ChatGPT alone every week, and 27% of US adults now say they interact with artificial intelligence "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey. We cook AI-generated recipes and talk to AI therapists. To a murkier degree, we probably even watch AI TV shows, listen to AI songs and read AI articles. And most of all, we use it to write: letters and emails, term papers and blog posts, wedding vows and breakup texts. Cole Kan/CNET/Getty Images Nearly three out of every four web pages created in April 2025 contained AI-generated content, according to the web analytics platform Ahrefs. AI obituaries are a small part of a larger ecosystem known as AI slop, a term that refers to useless, misleading and downright weird output from artificial intelligence. It's a big part of our lives in 2025 and — evidently — our afterlives, too. Still, the stakes feel uniquely personal when it comes to memorializing a real person. In a cruel twist, the greater the outpouring of grief from humans on social media, the greater the outpouring from AI. The first days after a death often create a data void where people are searching for information, and families are too overwhelmed and disoriented to provide it. Opportunists, including criminal networks around the world, are more than happy to fill that void. The more a death is being posted about, the more fake obituaries you'll see. "That's going to drive up the click count," says Robert Wahl, a professor of computer science at Concordia University Wisconsin who's been tracking AI obituaries over the past year. "They're going to get more hits and generate more revenue." AI obituary websites make their money through ads, and because the barrier to entry is so low, a handful of clicks means it's probably worth somebody's time. But where were these pages coming from? And how were they spreading with such astonishing speed? What is it about grief that leaves us so vulnerable to scammers? I spent weeks lurking on Facebook, talking to AI experts and tracking down one prolific AI obituary writer to learn more about the elaborate global economy of grief. As that obit pirate explained to me, it's about anything that attracts attention. "I don't base it all on obituaries," he says. "I do accidents, anything crime."/CNET The obituary spam cycle It's a natural instinct to connect with others when someone dies. For a lot of us, that means posting on social media. "This reaching out is asking others, please see me. Please see this pain. Please see this new void in my life and honor that with me," says Joanne Cacciatore, a professor of social work at Arizona State University and the author of Bearing the Unbearable. "When we're going through some of the deepest, hardest things in life, such as grief, online forums can be enormously powerful and connective for people," says Rebecca Soffer, author of The Modern Loss Handbook. "They can help people feel like they're really part of a community and being seen and heard." "Grief is not just about loss, it's about the erosion of control. And these AI obituaries just take another thing from mourners — the ability to choose how and when and by whom their loved one's story is told." Rebecca Soffer, author of The Modern Loss Handbook But this unknowingly kicks off a cycle of AI obituary spam. I tracked this dozens of times in the weeks I spent researching this story, and the velocity of the process was breathtaking: a sincere human would share the news on Facebook and within hours, there would be a dozen accounts sharing links to AI obits. Some of these were from accounts like Memorial Farewell (0 followers), while others purported to be real journalists. One, named "Katherine cathy," provided the eerie intro, "News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media." The photo of "Katherine cathy" on the Memorial Farewell site was taken from a 2015 New York Times video (right). The woman pictured here was an interview subject, not a journalist. Facebook/NewWhen I searched the names of people who'd recently passed away on Google with "death" or "obituary," the top results were always to AI obituary sites. (Another CNET editor tells me he's often encountered similar search results.) I could even watch a YouTube version of the obituary, complete with stock photos of candles and police cars — but only after I sat through an ad for Sling TV. AI obituary spam dominates Google's search results in the days immediately following someone's death. Google/Getty Images This cycle wears itself out pretty quickly. After a day or two, Google's search results are usually populated with legitimate sites, and the obituary pages and YouTube videos are often nowhere to be found. "We block billions of spammy pages from appearing in Search every day," a Google spokesperson tells me. "Recent updates to our spam policies have significantly reduced the presence of spammy obituary pages in Search, and many of the examples shared had already been detected and removed by our own systems. On YouTube, we rigorously enforce our policies prohibiting spam, deceptive practices." But by the time they're removed, the damage is often done. Traffic peaks in the hours and days immediately following a person's death. Even as the AI obit sites recede into the background, many readers have already absorbed false information about the deceased person. Many of the sites I visited also employed malicious redirects and fake virus warnings to wring even more revenue from my visit, but most of the time, the scam was more mundane: They just stole my attention for a few seconds. My conversation with an obituary pirate When I looked up the obituary websites on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — an international nonprofit that acts as an address book for internet domains — a shocking number of them returned home addresses in Iceland. The country has powerful privacy laws in place and has become a haven for website owners looking to shield their identities. The mailing address for many of these websites — including the one that published that initial obituary on Jamie — is Kalkofnsvegur 2, Reykjavik. This also happens to be the address of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, described on its website as "the world's only genuine penis museum." "People like to pick that address, in part because it's basically a big F-U to people like you or me who are trying to figure out who's actually behind them," says Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who studies online interactions. The velocity of the process was breathtaking: a sincere human would share the news on Facebook and within hours, there would be a dozen accounts sharing links to AI obits. Where these sites are located beyond that is anyone's guess, but most people I spoke with point to countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. "You need somebody to design the botnet. You need somebody to sort of design the scam," says Walter Scheirer, author of the 2023 book A History of Fake Things on the Internet. "You have to create the accounts trade with the advertising ecosystem that you're trying to play." "There's a longstanding set of criminal networks in Sub-Saharan Africa," Scheirer says. "In other cases, some of these things come from organized crime networks. In some cases, nation-states are running money laundering operations through criminal elements in other countries that they have some loose control over or support in some way." One site that's particularly active on Facebook, is registered in Abuja, Nigeria. For weeks, no one responded to my repeated emails, phone calls, text messages and Facebook messages. I eventually found a Facebook page called News Today (416 followers) that posts exclusively links to pages. I messaged the account asking for an interview, and the admin agreed to a call over WhatsApp. Cole Kan/CNET/Getty Images He identified himself as Harry John and said he'd been running for about six months, which lined up exactly with the registration date on ICANN. He confirmed that he lived in Nigeria and said he also pays one other person to share links to his obituaries on Facebook. He tells me he chose these topics specifically because he can monetize them for the most ad revenue. "I use ChatGPT any time I write anything concerning obits," he says. "When I get the news, I use ChatGPT to translate my words, my articles. Once I translate it, I take it to my WordPress and then post it on my Facebook." When I was trying to track down the source of these websites, I messaged dozens of accounts that posted links to AI obits. John told me he was on the other end of several of them. "You sent three, four messages each on my Facebook," he says. "I'm the one. Same Facebook, same website." John said he couldn't tell me how he decides who to write about, only that he focuses on popular or famous people. I didn't recognize any of the names I saw on his site, but I did notice that the obituary subjects he picked corresponded with high engagement on Facebook. John said that he has a source where he gets his news, but he wouldn't tell me what it was: "You can't expect me to give you my source of income." He insisted that all of his pages go through a fact-checking process on Google and Facebook. "Any obituary news I post, I must double-check everywhere to know that this thing is genuine before I post it on Facebook," he says. I asked John if he ever felt bad that he might be sharing false information about people who'd died, but he insisted that his content was always accurate. I thought back to those furious moments when my parents and I read the first AI obituary on Jamie. When I told people that story, they always expressed disbelief. How could people be so morally bankrupt? But once I got on the phone with John, it suddenly felt laughable to think of him as some type of criminal mastermind. He was trying to make a living, just like me. Before our call ended, he asked me if I'd be interested in working with him. "You get more traffic if someone from the US posts," he explained. How obituary piracy works It's hard to say exactly when these AI obituaries first began appearing, but they've clearly exploded in the past year. NewsGuard, a misinformation watchdog that tracks AI content, identified just 49 sites as "unreliable AI-generated news sites" with little human oversight when it started tracking them in May 2023. That number stands at 1,200 today. "A lot of the sites are specific and focused solely on creating obituaries, whereas others are just basic content farms that publish a range of content," says McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard's AI and Foreign Influence editor. I found more than 20 websites publishing AI obituaries while researching this story, but I got the sense that the true number was much higher — and impossible to definitively capture. They seemed to come and go in rapid succession. One day I'd see one on a domain like the next day it would redirect to a page of cascading popups that crashed my browser. "Platforms will not do anything unless required to. ... Choose your favorite social media platform — they've actually reduced or cut entirely their trust safety teams." Ben Colman, Reality Defender CEO Joshua Braun, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies profit-driven hoaxes, tells me that the goal for spam sites isn't just to get eyes on ads — it's also to camouflage bot traffic that's used to drive up page views. "When it comes to taking in ad revenue, drawing real visitors is part of the game, but a lot of it is also pumping in fake traffic," he says. "Drawing enough human visitors would throw off the detection mechanisms that might otherwise take note of all the automated traffic." Sometimes, the people being memorialized aren't even real. Scheirer tells me he first became aware of AI obituaries a couple years ago when he began seeing classmates he didn't recognize on a page for alumni from his high school. "I noticed through all these announcements for people who had died, none of whom I've ever heard of," he says. "There were so many, it was obvious that this was not human-generated content." What surprised me about the majority of these AI obits was how obviously fake they seemed. They often had the look of an illicit live sports streaming site, and it was pretty much guaranteed that you'd have to navigate a cascade of popups on each one. Once you got past those, there was rarely a human author attached to any of the pages — in Jamie's case, the byline was a first name only: Ritesh — and the writing flattened the deceased into a one-size-fits-all angel. References to kindness, loved ones and cherished memories abound but little that distinguishes them as an actual person. AI-generated obituaries rely on vague language that reveals little about the deceased. When the AI obits do offer details, they're often blatantly false, like Jamie's purported autism as cause of death. To quote my mom again, "Any intelligent person would look at this and say, 'This is totally not true.'" They didn't seem to be all that successful at it, either. The vast majority of the obituary bot posts on Facebook had no engagement and only a handful of followers. Occasionally they would make their way to bigger accounts, like 24/7 USA News (1.2K followers), but most of the time they seemed to be spamming into the void. And that doesn't really matter. "Because you're doing it at scale, especially because it's automated, you're gonna make some money that way," Scheirer says. "Even if one person visits it, two people visit it. "All these things are variations on a theme in scamming. Can you draw attention to something that is not real, that can be monetized?" A few seconds of your attention is worth something. That's enough time to catch a glimpse of an ad out of the corner of your eye or even sit through a five-second commercial on YouTube. These aren't enormous sums of money — one expert I spoke with estimated the scale at "pennies per page view" — but because the process is largely automated with the help of AI tools, obituary creators are able to cast an incredibly wide net. "Advertisers who are pumping the money into the system don't have any real accountability for where those ads are appearing," Braun says. "It's going through two, three, five intermediaries to place the ad." In a cruel twist, the greater the outpouring of grief from humans on social media, the greater the outpouring from AI. Ben Colman, CEO of the AI detection company Reality Defender, said the morass of AI slop isn't just going unchecked by social media companies — it's "passively encouraged" by them. "Buying and selling attention often means anything that attracts attention supports CPC- or CPM-based revenue," he says, referring to cost per click or cost per thousand, a metric where an advertiser pays a certain amount of money for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives. "The presumption is there's a business reason why they're keeping it, not a lack of technical ability," Colman says. Facebook's Community Standards prohibit "fake accounts, fraud, and coordinated inauthentic behavior," but the company also admitted that the problem is rampant. In a blog post published on April 24 detailing how it planned to crack down on spammy content, Facebook said it took down 100 million fake Pages last year that were "engaging in scripted follows abuse," which refers to artificially inflated engagement tactics like fake likes or comments. "We are aware of the proliferation of spam in general," a representative from Meta, Facebook's parent company, told me. "We're doing a number of things to curb this behavior, many of which can be found in our Transparency Center, specifically here on Account Integrity." Still, it was not hard for me to find as many fake obituary accounts as I wanted to. The more difficult task seemed to be not finding them. Cole Kan/CNET/Getty Images As fast as the AI tools have proliferated, social media companies and search engines have largely been left to police content on their platforms themselves. CNET's Katelyn Chedraoui, who writes extensively about AI, lays out a convincing case for the need for AI labels here, but the experts I spoke with said that won't be the norm unless the federal government mandates it. Congress has never been able to pass any meaningful legislation reining in content on social media companies, and the Supreme Court punted on the issue last year. The free speech vs. content moderation pendulum has generally swung with the president, and social media companies are now relying more on users to add context themselves through Community Notes features. "Platforms will not do anything unless required to," says Colman. "Looking at — choose your favorite social media platform — they've actually reduced or cut entirely their trust safety teams." "Moderating everything with a light touch seems to be where social media is trying to crawl back to," Braun says. "Advertisers could potentially demand more accountability. But again, when we're talking about ads that run off site, that's a different story." Some AI chatbots have attempted to cut the AI obituary scam off at the source. Wahl tells me he tried to have an obituary written about himself as a test using three popular AI tools: Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot. All three of them refused to do it. "Basically, what these companies have done is they've put in some guardrails in place to help protect against this, because I think it's been enough of a problem," he says. "They refused to generate an obituary for me because they couldn't find any other examples out there." OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to my requests for comment for this story. Is it a tribute? Or a scam? Obituary scams take many different forms, some of which stretch the definition of "scam." What if you open your wallet to "light a candle" on an obituary page and the family never even knows it exists? What about if the only thing that's stolen is your attention for some ad revenue? "I would still characterize that as a scam," says Scheirer. "It's clearly siphoning money out of the advertising world in an unethical way. This is not a legitimate thing." But there are varying degrees of truthfulness, like when obituary pirates deliberately target living people for their name recognition. Elijah Dittersdorf is the founder of Mom's Computer, an LA tech shop that helps seniors navigate scams. He told me he first started seeing obituary scams pop up in 2019, before generative AI tools were available. At the time, these were mostly focused on people who had some name recognition. "It's no different than a kid finding a good spot on the corner for a lemonade stand. Oh my God! People stop here, there's actually a place to park," he says. Facebook/Getty Images You might even wake up to find an obituary about yourself, as the Los Angeles Times writer Deborah Vankin experienced last year. Sometimes, it's not clear where the money you give to a website will end up. Echovita is a Canada-based company that "centralizes and aggregates publicly available obituaries," according to its website. According to the CBC, the Bereavement Authority of Ontario published two separate notices about Echovita after receiving 11 complaints from people who were "deeply upset" about their loved ones' obituaries appearing on the site. Paco Leclerc, the president of Echovita, was ordered to pay $20 million in damages to grieving families after his previous website, Afterlife, was found to have repeatedly violated copyright rules by using data to market flower sales. I looked up Jamie's name on Echovita and sure enough, there was a dry, templated version of her life. But there were also options to "give a memorial tree" or "light a candle" for Jamie. I opted to light a candle. I could choose three options: Eternity ($25), one year ($15) or one month ($8). I went with one month. (I can hear Jamie laughing at this.) What followed was a generic prompt to share the contribution on Facebook, Twitter (now known as X) or email. I asked Echovita where that money goes, and a representative told me they put aside 50% for the family. This can be claimed by enrolling in its "Solidarity Program," which requires that you submit documentation like a death certificate or attestation from the funeral home. "It's important to clarify that Echovita does not receive donations," an Echovita representative told CNET. "There's sometimes confusion around this because users can purchase virtual candles, memorial trees or send flowers, but these are optional tribute purchases, not donations." Facebook/Getty Images "We allocate a portion of our proceeds from flower orders and virtual candle purchases to the Solidarity Program," they said. Echovita wouldn't tell me how much money is passed on to families. Was Echovita a scam? Probably not technically. But a corporation accepting money that most families will never be aware of struck me as much more callous than a man in Nigeria pumping out obits with ChatGPT for $100 a week. Scheirer also tells me he's seen scammers target commenters on obituary posts from legitimate sources like funeral homes. "When there's open comments, you often find a ton of spam and automatically generated content," he says. "Essentially, there's a link, like, 'Could you donate to this fund?'" Once Scheirer pointed this out to me, I began noticing it everywhere. These were usually completely junky links where the only connection was the word "obituary" in the URL, and they almost always led to a video player with some version of "Live: Obituary and Funeral" at the top. These would always appear within minutes after someone posted about a loss. It was as clockwork as the genuine outpouring of love and support. I began to feel like an obituary pirate myself, searching Facebook for terms like "passed away" in the hopes of catching the scammers in the act before it was flagged. Or, even more uncomfortably, parachuting into this place of loss to extract some personal benefit. Nikolas Guggenberger, a law professor at the University of Houston, tells me that the deceased generally have fewer rights than a living person when it comes to privacy and defamation laws. Spam links leading to "live streaming" of funeral services proliferated in Facebook comments Cole Kan/CNET/Getty Images "You have a very easy defamation case if it's false information about the family that's still alive," he says. "It becomes a little harder when you want to build a defamation claim based on a defamation of the deceased themselves." Finding meaning for mourners Like grief in general, no two experiences of AI obituaries are exactly the same. While my mom was "furious," my dad recalled feeling irritated, but it was far down on the list of things he was thinking about. "At the moment, I was numb," he says. "I didn't dwell on it just because I wasn't part of that. I'm not much online." Both of these reactions felt true to me. There were much bigger things going on that day, but it also felt incredibly violating to read these inaccuracies hours after such a seismic event. "In the early days of grief, everything feels disorienting. You're trying to make sense of a world that no longer contains someone you love," says Soffer, the Modern Loss Handbook author. Cole Kan/CNET/Getty Images The body takes on a heavy load in the days after a loved one dies. Early stages of bereavement have been associated with increased heart rate, higher blood pressure and elevated cortisol levels. "Grief is not just about loss, it's about the erosion of control. And these AI obituaries just take another thing from mourners — the ability to choose how and when and by whom their loved one's story is told," Soffer says. But others contend that AI tools have actually been a positive introduction to the mourning process. Allyse R. Worland, a funeral director in Indiana, says AI obituary spam has been a "rare occurrence", and she's mostly heard good things about the tools. "I've seen it as a positive," she tells me. "Families feel like that's one less thing on their plate. They feel empowered. Because a lot of the families that I meet, they are completely stressed out." That made sense to me. I was in charge of writing Jamie's obituary, and I do remember feeling stressed about the prospect. But I also remember sitting around with my family trying to find the perfect word for Jamie's laugh. (We ended up going with "hee-haw snort.") I couldn't help but think AI would have robbed us of that experience. "You have a very easy defamation case if it's false information about the family that's still alive. It becomes a little harder when you want to build a defamation claim based on a defamation of the deceased themselves." Nikolas Guggenberger, University of Houston law professor Becky Robison, a writer and death educator who's published a guide to writing obituaries, describes the process as cathartic. "For me, putting together my parents' obituaries was very emotionally meaningful," she says. "Let me celebrate both of my parents who I've lost too soon. Let me tell people why I love them. "It won't solve your grief, but I think it can be a really meaningful way to work through some of that grief." How to identify AI obituary spam, and what to do if you see it I would approach any obituary you see on social media or Google with extreme skepticism. Here are some common red flags to look out for before clicking a link: Consider the source : Most of the AI obits I saw were distributed by bot accounts that exclusively posted links to obituary sites. If that's the case, it's a near certainty that the obituary has no connection to the deceased. : Most of the AI obits I saw were distributed by bot accounts that exclusively posted links to obituary sites. If that's the case, it's a near certainty that the obituary has no connection to the deceased. Check the time : If you see the link to an obituary within 24 hours after someone passes, it probably didn't come from the family. Obituaries are generally published within a week of the death and rarely within the first day or two. : If you see the link to an obituary within 24 hours after someone passes, it probably didn't come from the family. Obituaries are generally published within a week of the death and rarely within the first day or two. Examine the URL: Unless it's posted on the website of a local funeral home, newspaper or I would be inclined to write off an obituary as AI-generated with no input from the loved ones of the deceased. Another giveaway is that the URL has "HTTP" and not "HTTPS" at the beginning, which indicates that the data sent between your computer and the website is not encrypted. Unless it's posted on the website of a local funeral home, newspaper or I would be inclined to write off an obituary as AI-generated with no input from the loved ones of the deceased. Another giveaway is that the URL has "HTTP" and not "HTTPS" at the beginning, which indicates that the data sent between your computer and the website is not encrypted. Look for specifics: AI obits are usually quite vague and rely on generalizations like "cherished member of the community" or "kind heart." If you do identify a fake obituary about someone you know, these are some steps you can take to have them taken down: Representatives for the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission declined my request for a comment for this article. Human instincts Rereading that first AI obituary we were sent, I'm oddly touched by this machine portrait. I love the photo it chose for the header: Jamie proudly holding up a $20 bill with a Corona nearby. She looks beautiful. I have no idea what the context is. I still feel some far-off echoes of anger when I see the headline about Jamie's supposed autism cause of death, but it seems a little like getting mad at my refrigerator. It's likely that in the near future, AI obituaries will improve so much that I wouldn't be able to tell the real from the fake. I'm not sure if that will feel better or worse. "She was more than just a conglomeration of data. She was a real person," my mom says, reflecting on her initial outrage. After spending so much time reading Facebook posts from the newly grieving, I couldn't help but feel that there was something irreplaceably human about that instinct to reach out for connection in the most disorienting moments. Maybe the instinct to monetize it is too. Visual Designer | Cole Kan Art Director | Jeff Hazelwood Creative Director | Viva Tung Video Presenter | Owen Poole Video Editor | JD Christison Project Manager | Danielle Ramirez Editors | Katie Collins, Corinne Reichert Director of Content | Jonathan Skillings

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