You CAN use ChatGPT for genealogy (with accuracy)! Here's how

📌Explore this resource that can help you find more about your ancestors: https://youtu.be/8a8hUOHd6Ug

I use a very clear prompt for what I want to write and then include the fact list report from my genealogy software. This is one I use a lot as I am currently writing a book for relatives, and it does a pretty good job. You always have to edit and make adjustments but it is such a great starting place. You are a family historian writing a book to share what you have researched about your ancestors and any interesting members of the family. You are writing this book as a set of individual biographies rather than a single story. You are aiming to write this book to engage members of the family that are not overly interested in family history so you want to use an engaging narrative style of writing telling the story of each person rather than just a list of dates and places and dry facts. It is ok to give historical context, make some fair assumptions about what they may have been thinking or why they may have acted a certain way, and use the research to paint a picture of the person for the reader, but you MUST NOT add erroneous facts or just make stuff up. Everything you say must be based on the researched information and historical context.

Thank you for this. Ive been doing genealogical research for over 25 yrs and this is new info to me. Thank you again

I’m a researcher in the field and this introduction was an excellent summary for the public.

I am going to try this right away. I have been doing genealogy for years, and I've been wanting to write my ancestors' stories but it is very laborious. Thank you so much for bringing this to the genealogy community. The charting aspect is useful too. Thank you so much for sharing this.

Amy! This was an excellent and useful explanation of chatGPT, its workings and applications. I know you have done it in a family history context but the way you have presented it has supported my understanding of why this is such a hot topic in education right now where there is debate around chatGPT being a positive or negative resource for students. Lots of fear and misunderstanding can be eased by what you have explained and show to be a powerful tool with wide spread applications. Great job!! I will be recommending this video to my non-genealogy work mates to share these insights with them (as well as being a family history geek I also work in education in New Zealand) Thank you!

Wow that last tip re the table was really useful. thanks!

Wow! I just started searching for information about getting into genealogy and this is the first video that 'took my fancy'. I've also been looking heavily into Chat Gpt purely out of interest. Your video was not only very informative regarding genealogy, but also a massive eye opener about Chat Gpt!. Thank you very much

This is a terrific explanation that gives guidelines that are both specific to one type of use case - and general for any use! Bravo.

Another really helpful use I have found for it is writing emails to send to family members or DNA matches that you want to collaborate with.

Amy Johnson Crow! You are THE BEST. Thanks so much for addressing this topic, and the helpful comments your video has elicited.

Very, very interesting and helpful! Thank you!

Thank you for presenting this wonderful insight into what ChatGPT is and isn’t. I've been using it to help pull my stories together and using the right prompt is key. Im on a mission to get my stories done as age creeps up on me and time is running out. This is a quick way to get the story, then tweak it to suit my style and check the facts are correct. One still needs to edit, edit, edit. 😊

What an excellent video! I learned so much and it's really got the wheels turning in my brain now. I love the way you presented the information and how you gave concrete examples that we can learn from. Thank you! I've bookmarked this video and will return again and again.

You just explained ChatGPT better than computer guys do.... excellent! Everything you explained is so spot on. It is also good at writing, translating and correcting small chunks of computer code. I think that might be what it is still best at. Your advice is so good.... hope everyone takes it. ChatGPT can be a big time saver in some instances.

Amy, in all honesty, I learned more about the basics of ChatGPT from your video here than any of the ones I have viewed that were made by CIS scholars. Thank you.

I have used ChatGPT for some of my research. I gave it what I knew and copied and pasted chunks of my family history document and told it to spot any discrepancies. Extremely useful.

I found an old picture with many former MLB players from a long time ago and I wanted to know when the photo could have been taken, so I told chatgpt the names and chatgpt made a table with their birth and death dates to show me when exactly it could have been taken. Cool stuff

Thank you for confirming what I had hoped is possible. Besides the genealogy tips, I appreciate the mini tutorial on ChatGPT, which helps me understand what it is and a better way to ask for help.

Interesting and very useful article. My own use of ChatGPT has been for idea generation, especially in the domain of fiction writing, where the hallucinations matter less. One current deficiency is that interactions are size-limited, and if you are working with larger documents or datasets, it is sometimes very tricky to figure out how to slice things up while maintaining continuity. It is also relevant to point out that ChatGPT, in spite of not being a search engine (by the way, Google isn't the only or the best search engine out there), does contain a not insignificant amount of information. The problem is that there's no way to tell whether output is based on valid information or not. One potential method of improving this that I read about is to use ChatGPT itself to compare a reasonable sample of outputs to a given prompt generated by different instances of ChatGPT. The logic here is that facts that are training-based will be relatively constant (i.e., signal), while made-up facts (i.e., noise) will vary, so the comparison will be able to filter out the noise to produce a more accurate signal. This filtering could be fully automated as part of a future chat app. (The icing on the cake for me of this video was that Lawrence County, Ohio is also an important location in my own family tree.)