Yes, at the newspaper I worked it was called "the fridge", and people, specially interns, were tasked to put together stories about people who was likely to die next into the fridge when they weren't working on anything else.

Last month, the national news oulet of the Netherlands published a memoriam article about a (old) Dutch actress. It took them about half an hour before realising their mistake and rectifying it. Their statement said that, indeed, they make these articles in advance for certain people and it had been published on accident.

If this is news to you: most obituaries are written and produced during the subject's lifetime. Unless they leave life at a statistically unlikely age, the biggest chunks are in the can or pre-written so you can get a single person to do the voiceover over it all. Writers often start writing obits in the press. It lessens the burden of fact checking when the person actually punches their ticket.

So the Bidden footage was probably pre-produced. A similar package exists for the orange one as well. And Rob Reiner's would have been done as well. Although certainly nobody would have anticipated the way he died.

At this point in time you must suspect so-called AI to have its tendrils lodged in a lot of this stuff. I would suspect this less at media companies that still have more than a handful of actual humans employed. So the networks are probably okay. On clickbait dot news I'd be more suspicious.

I think that Wikipedia editors do that too

Yep, because of slipups is why we have the Nobel prizes.

They don’t have the bios ready to go but they certainly have the research capabilities at hand.