About a week ago I signed up for an online class through NGS which teaches how to leverage AI for genealogy. As part of the homework, we were asked to use ChatGPT to summarize a newspaper article about an ancestor and then have it write a biographical sketch. I didn’t follow the homework exactly (it asked to use an article with three events in an ancestor’s life) because I’m currently working on a family history for someone close to me and wanted to try this out on an article I plan to use for that history book. I have embedded…
Tag: artificial intelligence
Using ChatGPT 4 to Transcribe German Birth Records
Recently I tried using ChatGPT to transcribe the German birth record for my great grandmother. I don’t know the German language so figuring out what these records say has always been a challenge for me. A few years back I tried translating it myself and thought I had managed to extract the data I needed which was confirmation of the names of her parents and her birth date and place. But ChatGPT’s transcription, while not perfect, made me realize I might have missed something important about this record I didn’t realize at the time of my initial translation. Below is…
Using ChatGPT 4 to Transcribe Data from a PDF
If you’ve visited this site before, you are probably aware I have been volunteering with the Stories Behind the Stars (SBTS) effort to write stories for those who lost their lives serving in the US military during WWII. Soon after getting involved I also volunteered to help manage the Illinois database of names of the fallen from that state. The main challenge of that task has been to figure out which county each fallen member was from. To do this, I have relied on the WWII Honor List of Dead and Missing in the State of Illinois because this document…
“Programming” ChatGPT to Write a Story
Here’s an update on my continuing efforts to explore using ChatGPT and other AI tools to create stories for the Stories Behind the Stars project. After my last attempt, I was thinking that perhaps this could work if someone could program it to write the type of story I am looking for. But then I saw a Tweet by @thatroblennon which made me realize AI tools like ChatGPT can be programmed just by talking to them. This was somewhat of a revelation to me. So I decided to try my experiment again by first “programming” what I wanted. After several…
Using ChatGPT to Write Stories
Over the last year, I have been volunteering with Stories Behind the Stars (SBTS) to write stories of those from the U.S. who lost their lives in World War II serving in the military. So far, I have completed 43 stories – all but one about men who were from the area around my hometown. With over 22,000 fallen members just from Illinois that leaves a lot of stories left to write. Fortunately there are many others working on this effort, and for fallen members from some states like Utah or who fought in specific battles, all stories have been…