I freely admit that I’m never the first to jump on the newest tech wagon and that practice holds true for my venture into AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Although I could readily explain what AI is, I couldn’t claim a skill level any more adept than beginner.
Given that AI seems to be the trending topic at the moment in many spheres, including genealogy, that had to change.
As I’ve now done a bit more than tiptoe into the minefield, I thought others might find some of the resources I’ve found to be useful in improving their own understanding of AI – how it came to be, how to harness some of its power and – in a possibly very scary world in the future – understanding where AI might go.
For those who truly know little about AI, suffice it to say that it has been slowly creeping onto our genealogy lives, little by little, picking up speed to where it is now becoming a huge presence in our research.
An example of now old technology using AI is the introduction of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which enabled computers to index old newspapers for us.
A more advanced version of the same tool is FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search capabilities in their U.S. wills and land deed collections, finding new documents in which the names of our ancestors appear.
Moving quickly ahead in AI skill levels, ChatGPT and Perplexity and other AI tools help us locate information online and weave a narrative out of the details provided. Note, though, that AI isn’t always accurate so it’s necessary to check “facts” ourselves.
Here are three books about the history of AI that I’ve found useful. I’m not a techie science person at all and these books were not over my head.
Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era: Our Final Invention by James Barrat was actually published back in 2013, but there is a 2023 Preface added. Even without the 2023 addition, I can’t say this book is outdated at all in terms of teaching us about ‘superintelligence.’
Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, edited by John Brockman, is a series of essays, separated into chapters, representing the views of men and women currently (as of 2019) active in the computer science fields.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick is a 2024 book which I learned about from Diana Elder’s review on Family Locket.
While none of the three books reveals a connection to the genealogy world, each is highly rated in reviews and each costs under $20. Reading at least one of them will provide genealogists a foundation in understanding the world of AI. Warning: Possible Minds has some very techy-science-oriented chapters that aren’t the easiest reading.
Those in the tech forefront of genealogy are starting to produce videos, podcasts and blog posts to educate genealogists about the power of Artificial Intelligence.
Here are some other resources:
Artificial Intelligence: What Can Genealogists Learn from Marketers by Rick T. Wilson on MyFamilyPattern.com
WikiTree Day: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Genealogy Panel Discussion (2023)- YouTube
AI Tools for Genealogy by Bonnie Bossert (2024)- YouTube
Shocking Results! Should You Use AI Chatbots for Genealogy by Lisa Louise Cooke (2023) – YouTube
Where did I find all these resources? Of course, I asked ChatGPT4o to help out! UPDATE: Randy Seaver alerted me to many broken links in my original list. It seems AI didn’t do such a great job of finding articles and podcasts because many of them are no longer found online!
- “Family Tree Magazine Podcast” – AI Tools for Genealogy
Articles
- Using AI Effectively for Genealogy Research – Legacy Tree Genealogists
- AI Developments in Genealogy by Abby Tanner on FamilySearch
- A Genealogist’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence on Family Tree Magazine
Tools to try out for free:
FamilySearch Full-Text Search (Log in to your free FamilySeaerch account first.)
Open AI – ChatGPT4o
Claude (image interpretation)
This is a pretty hefty list that will provide hours of information about AI, its history and its insertion into the genealogy world and provide an opportunity to try out some of the chatbots. Aside from the three books suggested early in this post, everything else is free to access.