If you’d like to watch the YouTube demo you can find that HERE.
This week’s blog and video started a couple of evenings ago. I’d just sat down to watch some TV when my friend messaged me asking me to make a tree from a document that she was sending me. I’d just sat down, and I was tired, so I asked if I could do it in the morning, and she agreed.
As I started to create the tree, I realized I could probably get ChatGPT 4.o to make it for me, so I tried it. I was so impressed that I decided to create a video showing how easy it is to do. You can watch that video HERE.
So I started out with this document which is a screen grab that my friend found on Ancestry under Mayflower Source Records. It’s from the book Mayflower Source Records written by Gary Boyd Roberts and was published in 1986. You can find it on Google Books HERE.
I use ChatGPT 4o which is the paid version and I can access other peoples prompts so I used one that I learned about that was created by Steve Little. Steve has a blog called AIgenealogyinsights.com and he and Mark Thompson have a podcast called The Family History AI Show.
Steve’s prompt was called “Steve’s Fact Extractor” and that’s precisely what it does. If you can explore other people’s prompts, and I believe that’s only available with the paid version of ChatGPT, I encourage you to search for prompts created by Steve and Mark Thompson.
Once I attached the screen grab to the prompt, away it went, and I quickly got this. Now, I could have done the same thing manually or created my own prompt, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as quick as this.
After confirming the information was correct with no hallucinations, I then thought, why couldn’t I tell ChatGPT to create a tree? If you’re unfamiliar with hallucinations in AI, this means that sometimes, if AI doesn’t know something, it will make it up, so it’s always a good idea to make sure. If you have well-written prompts, you get fewer hallucinations, but I still always confirm, and I’m still working on improving the prompts. Although I have hundreds of hours of use, I’m still learning.
As I mentioned in the video, sometimes you have to make several attempts to get your prompt right. Or at least I sometimes do. The first time, I just said create a tree, and it did that, but then, after seeing it, I realized I wanted the vital stats in the tree, so I made sure that I asked for that. Also, in my original prompt, I didn’t remember to tell it to disregard the Sparrow family included in the screen grab. The more you work with AI, the better you’ll get at thinking about these things. But AI is patient…lol it never tells you that “you should have thought of that the first time,”… lol .. and for that, I’m thankful.
Here is the final tree that AI created. The transcript from the gravestone wasn’t clear about how Hannah Prence fit in the tree.. if you read it several times I figured it out but ChatGPT figured it out right away.
I knew my friend had a Mayflower connection but I didn’t realize who Hannah Prence was but only just yesterday I found out that she was the grand-daughter to William Brewster abt 1566-1644 who sailed on the Mayflower. How cool.
I know some people are worried about what AI will do, and I know that’s a real concern, but that Pandora’s Box is already open. There are also good things that come from AI, and helping us work smarter, not harder, is something that I’m interested in.
If you are related to Hannah Prence I’d love to hear about it.
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