Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again
-
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has given us an assignment tonight to:
1) Share one way in which you've implemented Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your genealogy research (You can do more than one if you like!). What AI tools did you use?
[thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]
Here's mine:
I have subscribed to ChatGPT+ since I took an NGS class on using
AI last year. I also follow Steve Little, who instructed the course, and Mark
Thompson on their podcast AI Genealogy Insights. I also have watched the Family Locket gals’ Diana Elder and Nicole Dyer, videos and listened to their
podcasts on how they have utilized AI in their work. I follow these
genealogists because I don’t want to fall behind in understanding the
technology, but I have decided to do my own writing rather than have the
AI bot do it for me.
However, I use artificial intelligence every time I use the FamilySearch experimental labs full-text search in deed and court records. In fact, I used it several days this past week while I was at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. I sat at a three-monitor station and had a Word document open on one screen, the FamilySearch window on the middle monitor where I conducted the search, and the file explorer window on the third screen for the downloads. RootsMagic was open on my laptop.
As I worked through looking for items of the surname Hulaniski, I wrote the source citation in the Word document and pasted in the URL, and then I downloaded the image to the file window, renaming it, starting with the date, so it sorts chronologically. I typed a short extract, and in another text color, made any notes about the documents. I found court cases in California, deeds in Niagara and Cayuga counties in New York, an estate file in Providence, Rhode Island, deeds in Marion County, Kansas, and Wapello County, Iowa, and court records in Lee County, Iowa. I even discovered that one of the Hulaniskis was a notary public and another a probate judge as they signed other people’s records. I would never have found that information without the every-word search.
This type of search brings up documents that I may not have
found in an index, plus records from places I didn’t even know they lived in. I
can’t wait for the experiment to be done on all kinds of records.
You're like me - I prefer to do my own writing. I've found I don't really even like AI-created images unless the post is about AI - it's kind of a turn off because then I wonder if AI wrote the non-Ai themed post or if the human blogger wrote. it.
ReplyDeleteI also feel as a certified genealogist, I should be doing my own transcriptions, analysis, and writing. I can see AI being used to summarize a complicated piece of writing to help with my own analysis. I used AI to create one drawing for a blog post but clearly identified it as such.
DeleteI'm in agreement with both of you against using AI for writing. But another way we all probably use AI is when we look at the hints from the different sites, because it's the same kind of thing going on.
ReplyDeleteI am glad for that!
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