My father died on a Tuesday. By Wednesday I had written fourteen drafts. By Thursday I had deleted them, poured a glass of wine, and pasted his obituary into ChatGPT with the prompt: 'Write a eulogy. Warm but not sentimental. He hated sentimentality. He was an engineer.'

The first draft was better than all fourteen of mine. I cried reading it, which I had not managed to do while writing my own versions, because my own versions were so bad that the predominant emotion was not grief but embarrassment. The AI wrote: 'He believed that every problem had a solution, and that most solutions involved duct tape, patience, and refusing to read the instructions.' This was my father. This was exactly my father. The machine had him in four seconds. I had him for forty-three years and all I could produce was 'He was a good man who loved his family,' which is what you write when you don't know the deceased.

I edited the AI's version lightly. I added a detail about his workshop and removed a line about fishing because he didn't fish — the AI hallucinated a hobby, which I found both technically interesting and deeply upsetting, as though even the machine couldn't resist the urge to give a dead man a richer life than he'd had.

People cried at the funeral. My brother said, 'You captured him perfectly.' I said thank you. I did not say that 'I' did not capture anything, that 'I' was sitting on my bathroom floor at 2 AM holding his reading glasses while a language model with no concept of death or fathers or reading glasses did the capturing for me.

The guilt is not that I used AI. The guilt is that it worked. Grief is supposed to be the one thing you can't outsource. It is supposed to be irreducibly human — the mess, the failure of language, the dignity of trying and falling short. But it turns out you can outsource it for $20 a month, and the product is better than the handmade version, which is exactly what they said about everything else AI replaced.

I kept his reading glasses. The AI doesn't know about that. Some things are still mine.