Welcome to September! The Tucson heat has broken and we finally have days with highs only in the 90s. The weather is wonderful!!!
This is also the first weekend of the month and it’s time for Randy Seaver’s weekly Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge.
1) How do you use Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to help you understand the lives, history, and geography associated with your family and your ancestors, that aid your genealogy and family history research?
My answer isn’t going to be very long. I rarely use AI. If I do, it’s to create a research locality guide to identify resources that I might easily miss on my own when researching a less familiar-to-me area.
Also, I occasionally ask AI a question about a history detail I might come across when researching.
Aside from those uses, I only secondarily access AI when it’s operating behind the scenes as with full-text search and indexed records.
That pretty much sums it up for me!
Thank you, Randy, as always, for fun SNGF topics.
I hadn’t thought to use it for a locality guide. I think our standard browser searches are now backed with AI. Even my new phone can use AI, though I have not turned it on.
I think Claude does a pretty good job on the locality guides. I tried first with a place I knew well and was impressed with the results.
Like you, I use it in very limited ways…mostly the help with troublesome transcription situations…generally 17th and 18th century handwriting, and even then, it still makes errors and makes things up, so I have to remember to tell Gemini not to do that.
I find it very disturbing that so many in our community are turning over their thinking to AI…but also accept everyone makes their own choices for their own reasons.
Like you, I rarely use it. I prefer to think it out myself.