Has anyone tried ChatGPT for genealogy yet?

Question

Given the enormous amount of data that the AI can access how good is it at researching for genealogy?

Comments

See one, two, and three (if not more). I'm still sceptical.

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The only thing I could see this benefitting would be to scrape data from anecdotal sources, putting together a draft GEDCOM, and using that GEDCOM as an offline starting point. To trust it with anything more is fallacy, because anecdotal sources (family association newsletters for example) introduce the possibility of too many errors that need to be checked against logic.

However, even if I were to attempt such a thing, and uploaded what I thought would be a perfectly sound GEDCOM, I’d likely frustrate a LOT of prior work anyway… but all at once.

Answer 1

I read where someone used ChatGPT to write Wikipedia articles. The results were superficially good, but there were a lot of factual errors, and the program sometimes just made stuff up.

Answer 2

I experimented with giving it vital stats and asking it to write a biography, but it embroiders, lol.

It kept adding things like "Martha was renowned for her baking and is fondly remembered by family and friends as a kind and generous person."

Answer 3

DON'T use ChatGPT for genealogy. It will make up anything to reply to the prompt you give it, as long as it looks similar to things it has been trained on.

Here's my trial:

Write a wikitree profile with citations for Martha Collins who was born in 1860 and died in 1923

From that minimal information it gave me all this fake stuff:

Martha Collins was born in 1860, likely in the United States, and died in 1923. She lived through a period of great change in the United States, including the Civil War and the Progressive Era.

Early Life and Family

Martha Collins was likely born in the United States in 1860. Little is known about her early life or her family. It is possible that she grew up in a rural or small-town setting, as many people did during this time period.

Marriage and Family

Martha Collins married John Smith in 1885, and the couple had three children: James, Mary, and William. Census records show that the family lived in various places in the United States over the years, including New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

Career and Accomplishments

Not much is known about Martha Collins's career or accomplishments. However, given the time period in which she lived, it is likely that she worked in a domestic or agricultural capacity, as was common for women during this time.

Death and Legacy

Martha Collins died in 1923, at the age of 63. She was likely buried in a local cemetery, though the exact location is unknown.

While Martha Collins's life may not have been notable in the traditional sense, she is representative of the millions of women who lived during a time of great change in the United States. Her life and experiences provide insight into the daily struggles and triumphs of working-class women during this era.

Citations:

1. United States Census, 1900. Census Place: Johnstown Ward 9, Cambria, Pennsylvania; Roll: 1391; Page: 11B; Enumeration District: 0016; FHL microfilm: 1241391.

2. United States Census, 1910. Census Place: Dayton Ward 7, Montgomery, Ohio; Roll: T624_1210; Page: 6A; Enumeration District: 0119; FHL microfilm: 1375223.

3. United States Census, 1920. Census Place: Bethlehem Ward 9, Northampton, Pennsylvania; Roll: T625_1617; Page: 10B; Enumeration District: 107.

4. Find A Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/unknown-127524507/martha-collins: accessed 13 March 2023), memorial page for Martha Collins (1860–1923), Find A Grave Memorial no. unknown, citing unknown cemetery, unknown location; Maintained by unknown.

Comments

This all depends on how you write your prompt. Indeed. if not instructed otherwise, ChatGPT will "make up things" as it tries to come up with the most probable text. You can however ask it not to. I had good results in getting it to write some ancestors story with a prompt like this:
"I want you to write the life story of John Doe based on the fact below. I want you to stick to the provided facts. You can add historical context. DO NOT make up facts. Write in the style of an historian:
- Born on 1 Dec 1785 in Massachussets
- Son of ...."

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Joseph: I've done lots of experimenting with all kinds of prompts to make ChatGPT follow strict rules, because I was trying to integrate it into the new WBT Auto Bio.  It's possible that I'm just bad at this, but I couldn't get the thing to stick with my template and not make stuff up.  Your prompt there is a bit like things that I tried, but...  I'm sure there must be a good way to shackle this beast, but I haven't found it yet.

Answer 4

Use of ChatGPT and other AI tools is a terrible idea.

We've already been battling many data quality problems related to garbage content harvested from unsourced online family trees that humans mistakenly trusted because the same [bad] data appeared on hundreds of websites. If humans can't (or won't) judge the reliability of data they find on the Internet, why would anyone expect AI bots to do better? Asking bots to assemble genealogy data would only expand the volume of garbage and accelerate the process of creating new garbage.

Comments

I am always a little leery of adding more 'tools' that will make genealogy easier. 

If people don't want to do what is needed, perhaps genealogy or parts of genealogy isn't the best choice.

If you don't want to write biographies, don't, just put the facts and nothing but the facts. You don't have to make a story out of the information. 

There are already uncountable numbers of unsourced, badly sourced, incorrect family trees in existence. Lots of which happened because people thought that all those other trees can't be wrong. The hints or suggestions must be correct. 

And we all know how that works out. 

It means my 4 x GGM must really have had 3 husbands named George at the same time, 2 in England and 1 in North Carolina, plus as a woman with 3 husbands she gave birth to 2 children in 1818 one in April and the second in July, 2 children 3 months apart in 1827, and 7 children between 1828 and 1831. 

How do I know this? Because the many people I contacted over the past 12 years told me they were right.

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I don't reccommend it for security and Privacy reasons.

Answer 5

No, But due to privacy reason, I would not Recommend it unless you know for sure the people you are looking up are dead.

Answer 6

I have asked both Bing Chat and Google Bard who I am. Bing Chat gave a reasonable answer.

Bard is currently a whacky ride.

Bard had me as the CEO of WikiTree for a few days (I was honored) and I am now a Product Manager at IBM. I am obviously neither. Apparently, they are having a heck of a time with their LinkedIn connection.