Ah what the fuck. Theo was my favorite Cosby kid, and his work producing Magic School Bus was integral to the education of many children. RIP a fucking legend.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Drowning; in the ocean no less. My condolences to his family. He led an inspired life, and will not be forgotten.
Holy shit that's so fucking sad! :(
He kept the hustle going with sitcom fav "Malcolm & Eddie," voiced one of the coolest cartoons -- yeah, "The Magic School Bus" -- and even flexed his music chops with a Grammy win in 2015.
Wow, using AI to write obituaries now?
What about that makes you think AI was used?
A common phenomenon I've seen people cite is the use of em dashes, something this article does not do.
I think only ChatGPT would say 'he kept the hustle going with' in an obituary.
The argument never holds much water for me. For one, as I mentioned in another comment I went back and skimmed some TMZ articles covering celebrity deaths over a decade and they have similar writing styles. But more importantly, LLMs were trained on things that real humans wrote. Meaning if Chat GPT spits it out, someone at some point wrote something at least similarly.
A common phenomenon I’ve seen people cite is the use of em dashes
– yeah, “The Magic School Bus” –
It isn't even the punctuation, but more the writing style that makes me think this is AI generated. A human isn't going to write an obituary and be this casual and informal about it, not even for TMZ.
The article does not use an em dash, it uses two hyphens. Bizarrely, you correctly quote it in your original post but did not the second time.
This is something humans often do because it's easier on most keyboards. I've never seen a genAI spit out two hyphens rather than an actual em dash.
Your argument about writing style does not convince me. I scanned some TMZ celebrity death articles going back a decade (before genAI would be used) and they look very similar.
In this 2019 article reporting on Rip Torn's death, they end with "RIP, Rip". Feels to me as a very similar level of informality. (the double hyphens, opposed to em dashes, are also used in this example)
Odd that the dash/hyphen would change, I copied and pasted both (the first directly from the article, and the second from my original post). I do think that when I write an email in Outlook it will automatically change my hypen to an em dash.
And there's a difference in writing a tongue-in-cheek obituary for someone like Rip Torn than for Malcolm-Jamal Warner, but I will concede that it does sound like TMZ is just bad at writing obituaries.
I use em-dashes—and goddamnit I’m not gonna stop!
It says he won a grammy for his music, but it's not clear what it was for because he doesn't brag about it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRTL-9xLj8nmD4ikbe6F-Xw
will keep my bedroom untidy on his memory
Damn! That is a horrible way to go. This shit sucks. Malcolm was a cool actor and seems like a really good guy too. Fuck, man.
Oh wow.. RIP