The Day My AI Bubble Burst

Lessons from RootsTech, Fake Footnotes, and That Time I Texted Shakespeare to My Grandkids

Wow! It's already week 12 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks! The topic? Historic events. I want to take part, but I'm fighting the tail end of a month-long virus that hit our entire office at work, perhaps the whole city, and frankly it's on my last nerve.

To amuse myself, I sent silly texts to the grandkids, set up new rules to tame my email, and made a professional voice clone, since my voice stopped working for a bit. Here is a sample. This silly 49-second video starts out with me talking about RootsTech, or am I?

Then I thought, well, let's check out the new features in FamilySearch and Ancestry. They always release new things when RootsTech has its yearly Genealogy Technology conference in March. And as I logged into FamilySearch, I had a sudden flashback.

Let's call it: The Day My AI Bubble Burst

It's 2022. I’m sitting in my easy chair, feet up, recovering from surgery. And I’m bored, because everything feels fine when I sit still, but moving is a problem. So I figure out how to log into this new ChatGPT thing and ask it to write a haiku for a contest at work. Then I have it write the grandkids some silly texts in Shakespeare’s voice.

"Verily, sweet sprouts, tell me true, have thy Christmas wish lists met their due?"

Fun! But, now what? Shall we try stalking some ancestors?

I’ve been researching Grand Uncle Dorr. The census says he was doing janitorial work for the Sioux City school system in the 1910s, and I wonder how much a janitor would have earned. Was this family above the poverty line?

Surely that’s information ChatGPT can find. So I ask.

This amazing tool gives me income information, and news articles from the Sioux City Journal about the Great Sioux City Labor Strike of 1917, complete with detailed source citations!

Wow! Did you know there was a Great Sioux City Labor Strike in 1917? Me either!

I hop over to newspapers.com to find the article it mentions from the Sioux City Journal. Saturday, May 21, 1917. Wait... May 21 was a Monday, and this issue does not exist. Nor does this news article.

Every single citation turns out to be complete fiction. It’s all made up!

ChatGPT was unleashed on an unsuspecting world on November 30. It's only a couple of weeks old, and a little bit of research tells me it does not yet have internet access.

Well, hello, why didn't it just say so?

Clearly this GPT stuff is only good for texting Shakespeare to the grandkids. And they’re already over that.

If you’ve read some of my other articles, you might think I spend all my time playing with AI. Honestly, no. I have a cat. I have grandkids. I have ancestors!

Also, don’t tell, but I'm not super techie. I did start out as a Junior Programmer back in 1980 and do manage a team of software developers now, so I guess you could say I've been techie-adjacent for more than four decades.

I've also been stalking my ancestors for nearly as long, trying to get them to tell me their stories. And while not a professional genealogist, I've made so many genealogy mistakes that I think I'm qualified to give this opinion: AI is here to help us make more family history mistakes even faster, if we let it.

Or it could help us, if we pay attention and understand what we're getting into. We'll see.

100 years from now when our descendants take part in 52 Ancestors for The Next Great Century, will they look back on historic events and think of November 30, 2022 as one of those landmark events?

Maybe they'll mark it as the last day they could be sure their ancestors wrote things themselves, without machine assistance. Or the last day that you could do a Google Search and get actual search results, and not a weird Google AI overview that stole stuff from a bunch of other websites and compiled it at the top of the page.

I don't know. I'm curious. What do you think?

If you just came back from RootsTech and saw some of those AI presentations, maybe you're looking for a list of links to get you started. Here's my list. It's not all-inclusive. It's just some people I like. Help yourself. Go slow. And don't be fooled.

People & Blogs (Free or free with pay options):

• Ethan Mollick – https://substack.com/@oneusefulthing

• Steve Little & Mark Thompson – https://aigenealogyinsights.com/author/digitalarchivst/ & https://makingfamilyhistory.com – They also co-host a podcast together.

• Andrew Redfern – https://andrewredfern.com/family-history/

• Mark Humphries – https://generativehistory.substack.com

• Denyse Allen – https://www.youtube.com/c/paancestors / https://denyseallen.substack.com

• Beaumont Genealogy – https://www.youtube.com/@Beaumont-Genealogy

• Carole McCulloch – https://www.youtube.com/@essentialgenealogy2.0

• Randy Seaver’s Blog, AI Category – https://www.geneamusings.com/search/label/Artificial%20Intelligence

• Many of the popular Genealogy Channels and Blogs have episodes specific to AI (Amy Johnson Crow, etc.) Just do a search. List your favorites in the comments!

• Family Tree Webinars – https://familytreewebinars.com (There is a modest fee.)

• The Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) group on Facebook