Empowering Genealogists with AI: Presentation to National Genealogical Society (NGS)

I gave a presentation titled "Empowering Genealogists with AI" to the National Genealogical Society on September 6, 2023. The talk covered emerging beneficial use cases of AI-assisted genealogy while addressing current limits, privacy issues, and ethical concerns, and includes a homework assignment you can complete to create an AI-generated handout as practice (jump to 1:04:00 … Continue reading Empowering Genealogists with AI: Presentation to National Genealogical Society (NGS) →

Crafting a Genealogy Prompt for ChatGPT: Five Valuable Components

The post was prepared as part of my upcoming talk: The National Genealogical Society is hosting a MemberConnects! event on Empowering Genealogists with Artificial Intelligence. Join us Wed. 6 Sept 2023, at 8 p.m. ET. Register here: https://bit.ly/NGSMemberConnects6Sept2023 As we venture deeper into the digital age, the intersection of genealogy and artificial intelligence (AI) is … Continue reading Crafting a Genealogy Prompt for ChatGPT: Five Valuable Components →

A (Possible) Future of A.I. Genealogy Research: Open Archives and ChatGPT

UPDATE: Shortly after sharing this post, Bob Coret, the creator of the "Open Archives" plugin (and a founder of the site), got in touch. The "Open Source" plugin in more impressive than my cursory exploration revealed. The plugin is more thoroughly documented at his blog post, which is linked at bottom along with further observations. … Continue reading A (Possible) Future of A.I. Genealogy Research: Open Archives and ChatGPT →

Using ChatGPT Plugins for Genealogy

What they are, where to get them, why use them, and how to use them: Using the AskYourPDF plugin as an in-depth example I. Introduction: Plugins: What, why, where, & how [NOTE: For clarification: the plugin features discussed in this post require a ChatGPT Plus subscription. At $20/month, you gain access not just to GPT-4 … Continue reading Using ChatGPT Plugins for Genealogy →

AI Genealogy Use Case Guide: How-to Get from Story to Structured Data, 2: Create GEDCOM (family tree) files from obits, articles, & announcements

Go directly to the step-by-step walk-through. This detailed how-to is a follow-up to the use case announcement from March 17, 2023 titled “Using ChatGPT to Write Stories from Family Trees, Create Trees from Stories“. This is Use Case Guide #3 and builds upon: Use Case Guide #1: How to Clean Raw and Poor OCR Text, … Continue reading AI Genealogy Use Case Guide: How-to Get from Story to Structured Data, 2: Create GEDCOM (family tree) files from obits, articles, & announcements →

AI Genealogy Use Case Guide: How-to Get from Story to Structured Data, 1: from Text to Table Data, from Stories to CSV files

Go directly to the step-by-step walk-through. This detailed how-to is a follow-up to the use case announcement from March 22, 2023 titled "Using ChatGPT to Glean Info from Obits, Articles, and Announcements". This is Use Case Guide #2 and builds upon Use Case Guide #1: How to Clean Raw and Poor OCR Text. This Use … Continue reading AI Genealogy Use Case Guide: How-to Get from Story to Structured Data, 1: from Text to Table Data, from Stories to CSV files →

Hello world!

Welcome to AI Genealogy Insights, where we explore how artificial intelligence can assist genealogists and family history researchers, with a particular focus on: discovering the advantages and limitations of AI, and how genealogists can apply this knowledge. As someone with training and a background in applied linguistics (natural language processing and computation linguistics--foundations of artificial … Continue reading Hello world! →

AI Genealogy: Text to GEDCOMs: Surprises, Cautions, Discoveries

I had an opportunity today to experiment a bit more with using artificial intelligence to create family trees (GEDCOM files) from narrative texts. My goal was to see how much I could limit the AI's creativity to insert information into the GEDCOM file that wasn't in my prompt. (Earlier, I had discovered two constraints that … Continue reading AI Genealogy: Text to GEDCOMs: Surprises, Cautions, Discoveries →