By now, you’ve probably seen it: An obituary that was allegedly written by an artificial intelligence has been making its way across the Internet, delighting, scaring, or disgusting the people who see it.

As it turns out, however, the piece was not written by a bot at all; it was written by a comedian by the name of Keaton Patti, who has been creating similar works for years.

When Patti first attracted interest, he was claiming that he had “forced” a machine to read several thousand scripts, then had tasked it with writing one of its own. After leading experts began looking in to things, though, the truth came out: While there are programs that can automatically generate text, none of them would produce the results seen in Patti’s viral content.

In fact, those same experts now agree that Patti almost certainly wrote everything himself, and that his claims of using a computer program were exaggerated at best.

As for the obituary, it has been confirmed to be an excerpt from Keaton Patti’s 2020 book – predictably titled “I Forced A Bot To Write This Book” – in which he humorously (if indirectly) admits that the bot never existed. Even so, the comedian deserves applause for effectively tricking millions of people, and we at the RamsesThePigeon News Network thank him for forcing a bot to write this news piece.