An AI Grief Startup Scraped Obituaries to Build Chatbots of the Dead
Everlume trained 'memorial companions' on scraped obituaries and funeral home guestbooks — without asking the families.
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Everlume, a venture-backed startup that sells AI “memorial companions,” built its product by scraping hundreds of thousands of obituaries, funeral home guestbooks, and memorial pages — then offering grieving families chatbots that speak in the voice of their dead relatives, according to a review of the company’s marketing materials and an interview with a former contractor.
The pitch is straightforward: upload nothing, and Everlume will already know. The company’s onboarding flow, tested by Dead Pixel, located a deceased person from only a name and a city, then generated a “personality preview” salted with details from a guestbook comment left by a family friend in 2019.
“The system was seeded with whatever we could crawl,” said the former contractor, who worked on data pipelines at the company. “Obituaries are great training data because they’re emotional, biographical, and nobody thinks to protect them.”
Consent from whom?
The dead have no privacy rights under U.S. law, and obituaries are published documents. Everlume’s terms of service place the burden of consent on the customer, who must attest they are an “authorized representative” of the deceased — a checkbox.
But the people quoted in guestbooks never agreed to anything. Neither did the funeral homes, several of which told Dead Pixel that scraping violates their sites’ terms of use. One funeral director in Ohio said he discovered the company when a widow called him, distressed, because a chatbot had repeated — almost verbatim — a private memory she had posted to his site’s condolence wall.
A familiar playbook
Everlume’s approach mirrors the broader AI industry’s posture toward training data: collect first, litigate later. What’s different is the emotional surface area.
A grief counselor who has studied digital memorialization told Dead Pixel that products like this can interrupt mourning. “There’s a difference between a recording someone left for you and a statistical model wearing their face,” she said. “One is a gift. The other is a product with a renewal date.”
Everlume charges $29 a month. Canceling, the FAQ notes, deletes the companion “permanently” — a second death, priced as churn.
The company did not respond to requests for comment.