Harnessing the Power of AI to Help You Write about Your Ancestors

1/7/2024

Harnessing the Power of AI to Help You Write about Your Ancestors

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AI in Genealogy, AI in Writing, Writing Ancestor Biographies, AI Help

The Combined Power of AI and Timelines in Ancestor Writing

Just a few days before MyHeritage announced their newest feature, AI Biographer, which you can read about in my post, “New MyHeritage Feature: AI Biographer, Creates Instant Biographies for Your Ancestors!”, I was literally working on a couple of projects that was doing just that, using AI for my biography, as well as for my ancestors’ biographies! I was taking all my own historical facts from my timeline and copying and pasting them in an AI paraphraser tool to create something just like this! At the same time, I was telling myself that it would be cool if either Ancestry or MyHeritage came out with a feature that did exactly what I was doing manually, take everything from your timeline/ancestor’s timeline and create a story or biographical sketch using AI. Who knew that MyHeritage was working on just that behind the curtains, right at the time I was envisioning it!

I quickly found that if I create one myself from ancestors in my family tree, using their timeline events, I can create a fairly descent ancestor story/biography. Of course, it wasn’t that quick, and I had to manually tweak the paragraphs then run them through a paraphraser again. Then today, I decided to add some historical context throughout to make it a bit more interesting, taking cues from Ancestry’s new AncestryAI and My Heritage’s new AI Biographer, by using some of the events in my timelines and running them through an AI chat program. I also tweaked those as well. Altogether, I used quite a few different programs to accomplish my final test product. Check out the result below! 😊

My Ancestor Biography, with the Help of AI

*This example is all based on my OWN research and taken from my own ancestor timeline, which is filled with facts and events based on my research. I then used AI to help me paraphrase my facts and events.

George W. Taylor, Ancestor Biography- Page 1

George W. Taylor, Ancestor Biography- Page 2

George W. Taylor, Ancestor Biography- Page 3

George W. Taylor, Ancestor Biography- Page 4

George W. Taylor, Ancestor Biography- Page 5

George W. Taylor, Ancestor Biography- Page 6

More AI and Genealogy Resources

Learn about more AI in Genealogy and other family history and genealogy resources under the AI in Genealogy and Genealogy Resources category and on my dedicated Genealogy Resources page.

6 Comments

Marian B Wood

1/9/2024 08:46:17 am

Decent ancestor bio, indeed. I just don't like the terms & conditions stating that any info we use for AI Biographer will be retained and used for the AI training, etc.

Diane Henriks link

1/9/2024 10:07:18 am

Thanks Marian...as mentioned in the blog, this is NOT MyHeritage and has nothing to do with MyHeritage...this is my research and my facts and writing, paraphrased in a paraphraser tool, since I think analytically and if I did not get the help of an AI paraphraser tool, it would just be sentence after sentence of boring facts, literally (except help with historical info), thus my motto: ANYONE CAN PUBLISH THEIR FAMILY HISTORY 🙂

Molly of Molly's Canopy link

1/11/2024 11:06:59 am

I am also leery of AI because of the privacy concerns that Marian mentioned. For now, I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to this new technology.

1/13/2024 08:35:57 am

Any AI? Just to reiterate, as others seem confused by my post...This is NOT MyHeritage AI Biographer, as I blogged about last week; it is my own research, work, and words/facts that I ran through an AI paraphraser tool. :)

Jenny Hawran link

1/11/2024 11:37:01 am

I am absolutely fascinated to hear the different ways people are using AI for genealogy. I haven't tried MyHeritage's bio tool yet, but I've been experimenting with ChatGPT. There are always going to be both sides on this issues, but I'm interested to see where AI leads us and what the capabilities are.

1/13/2024 08:38:39 am

Yes, AI can be very helpful, but you also need to be careful what you are using it for. Just to reiterate, as others seem confused by my post...This is my own research, work, and words/facts (minus some historical help) that I ran through an AI paraphraser tool. :)