Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night Again
-
Time For Some More Genealogy Fun!!
Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has our assignment for tonight:
1) Are you experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for genealogy and family history? What have you learned so far? What have you done to date? What GPTs have you used? What results have you had - good or bad?
Here’s mine:
I have a subscription to ChatGPT but I have not used it
much. I took a class last fall from NGS taught by Steve Little and learned how
to write prompts. We learned how to get it to summarize text we have fed it,
such as a transcription of deed or probate records. We learned to review the
results to check against hallucinations. One of the first things I tried was to
have it create an outline for a genealogy talk I wanted to prepare. It has some
good ideas, but I ended up using only a few of the suggestions.
Then I forgot about AI until this week when I took another workshop on AI, this time taught by Nicole Elder Dyer. She presented about using AI to write research reports and narratives from research logs and outlines. I don’t keep research logs but thought that having a detailed outline would be useful to help draft a narrative.
I tried it out with ChatGPT4. First, I created a timeline from RootsMagic and saved it as a text file. I then told the bot it was an expert genealogist and writer and to write a biography. I was disappointed in the results. It was too flowery and left out some of the events. Next, I decided to include the events of his spouse and children. This time I saved the timeline as a .csv file. This time the bot was to read the file and analyze it before creating the bio. Again, I was disappointed. The children the bot mentioned in the bio were not the correct names. There were too many hallucinations. This is going to take more practice.
The AI I have used in the last couple of months is the new feature at FamilySearch with the every-word search in deeds and probate records. I have found a few deeds that were missed in regular index searches. Some deeds were those of the sheriff selling land that the court ordered him to sell due to a court order. Normally, the index would only name the sheriff as the seller and the buyer. I also found an agreement between an ancestor and another person that was not in the index. Future uses will be to locate the FAN club of residents along a watershed or to locate witnesses or neighbors.
I won’t give up and keep attending classes and webinars, as well as practicing the prompts.
You've done way more than I have. I have used full-text search, but didn't even mention it in my SNGF post because I'm seeing AI more as a computer doing the thinking and creating for us rather than an OCR reader.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but it is learning to "read" handwriting.
DeleteI agree with Linda! I absolutely think of how people are using AI is having the computer do the thinking. But I agree with you, Lisa, that having the every-word search available is extremely useful. But is that really using AI the way so many people want to use it?
ReplyDelete