All About That [AI] Prompt? No Trouble!

Are you curious about using AI (artificial intelligence) for your genealogical research? Perhaps you have felt confused about how to use the various tools. Perhaps you have experimented with some of them and become frustrated. Well, the secret is in the prompts. When you phrase your inquiry in a certain way, you will likely have no trouble getting helpful results. Let’s explore how to do that!

Exploring the Tools

The various AI tools that you can use in genealogy have grown exponentially over the last year. First, there are large language models (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) that allow you to chat with them and receive information. Some tools, like Perplexity, even offer citations and allow you to share your knowledge and/or correct what it provides. Then, there are other tools that specialize in certain tasks like photo editing (MyHeritage) and generation (DALL-E), video/audio creation (DeepStory), and handwriting/translation (Transkribus). Some also summarize documents/webinars and create podcasts from articles (e.g., ListenLater and Podcastle). FamilySearch has even unleashed AI on some of its unindexed probate records, which has allowed users to search using keywords, names, and dates! For a while, many of the tools required payment and/or subscriptions, and that is still the case for some; however, more and more tools are becoming freely available online or have free trials and/or limited accounts.

Creating Those Prompts

As you can see, the world of AI is filled with possibility and promise, and it is going to continue to grow in the coming months and years. The key to using many of these tools is in the prompt, and you will ask AI to perform a task in a different way than you would a human.

Since it is a machine, you must be very clear and succinct with what you ask AI to do and how you ask AI to do it. If you are not clear, you will likely find that your results are not helpful or accurate (e.g., hallucinations). Steve Little (AI Program Director for the National Genealogical Society) has a great blog post that breaks down how to create a successful prompt. Basically, you have to identify a role for the AI, your goal for using it, a task you want it to perform, and how you want your results to be organized.

For more on understanding and creating prompts, check out Writing AI Prompts and this helpful page from MIT. In the future, the need to carefully craft prompts may not be needed, but for now, it is a crucial part of using these tools successfully.

Staying Critically Aware

Of course, you will want to use AI with care and practice the same genealogical standards as you would with other research. Remember to triangulate your results with what you already know! Also, you will want to watch for bias because these tools have been trained by humans on human data, so certain ways of thinking may appear in your results. In short, critical thinking is key. You cannot let the machine do all the heavy lifting, but it can certainly make some tasks easier.

Enjoy exploring the tools and the endless possibilities they provide!