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
Ugh I think we all have these hallucination stories when it comes to AI - I have one from yesterday, lest we think those good old days are gone! Which is the problem I have about AI as a research tool and source of information. We might recognize the errors and laugh them off, but not everyone does.
In a time when false information and fake narratives are ripping our social fabric to threads - and when more and more people are relying solely on social sources - adding more of both into the open spaces of life seems…geez… terrifying? Irresponsible? Contemptible? Wrong?
How long will it take before AI and we as a people recycle and codify those false facts into daily life as if they were true and actual?
And what will that mean for us all and the future us? 🐓🐓🌅🍁 (< chicken little 🤣)
Also @Denyse, that book seems like one you should write and put out into the world - what interesting stories you’d find!!
I’ve
Thank you for including me in the list of links! I also used ChatGPT in those first weeks, foolishly asking it for books and articles on conscientious objectors in the Civil War in Pennsylvania. It promptly made up a title, author, synopsis and publisher that sounded exactly like what I wanted. After not being able to google it, I contacted Penn State Press who said “that book doesn’t exist”. But boy, I still wish it did.