How will Artificial Intelligence affect Genealogy?

 

Here is the origin of the term "artificial intelligence"

John McCarthy is one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence, together with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon. McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined the term "artificial intelligence" in a proposal that they wrote for the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956. This conference started AI as a field. (Minsky later joined McCarthy at MIT in 1959.)

I would have been in elementary school in 1956 but I was an avid reader of science fiction and probably learned about artificial intelligence about the time it became a popular term. But the book I Robot by Isaac Asimov was already published in 1950 and I am sure I read that book about the same time it was still newly published. In addition to my interest in science fiction, I have also read extensively about the history of computers. I knew enough to know that the early AI app, Eliza (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA, flunked the Touring Test (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test if you are interested).

What has this to do with genealogy? Well, many people have been involved in FamilySearch's Indexing project. If you go to FamilySearch.org and click on the Indexing link and then ask for a project, you will get the following screen. 

Yes, there are no projects to do in English. In fact, you can search in all the languages and there are no projects found. The only thing left are reviews using the app on your phone. Why is this? AI indexing using handwriting recognition is indexing the records. Now, the job for human intervention has moved to reviewing the AI Indexing. 

Yet the development of current AI projects, such as those currently being implemented by Google and Microsoft, demonstrate an even more expansive. Here is a question I put to ChatGPT:

Tell me about Henry Martin Tanner born in 1852 in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, California and died on 21 March 1935 in Gilbert, Maricopa, Arizona, United States. What did he do for a living, tell me about his family, were any of his children famous. 

Relatively, there is a huge amount of information about Henry, much of it in digital form online, including a complete biography. So, what did ChatGPT have to write about him? Here is what I got from ChatGPT:

Henry Martin Tanner (1852-1935) was an American artist known for his paintings and prints of landscapes, figures, and biblical scenes. He was born in San Bernardino, California, to parents who were former slaves, and was the eldest of thirteen children.

Tanner's family moved to Philadelphia in the late 1850s, where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He later studied in France, where he lived for most of his life and where his work was greatly influenced by the Barbizon School of landscape painters.

Tanner's work often reflected his Christian faith, and he is perhaps best known for his religious paintings, such as "The Raising of Lazarus" and "The Annunciation." His work was also notable for its realism and its use of light and shadow.

Tanner was married to Jessie Macauley Olsson, a Swedish-American opera singer, and they had one child together, a son named Jesse O. Tanner. Jesse was not famous, but he did follow in his father's artistic footsteps, becoming a photographer and graphic designer.

In addition to his artistic work, Tanner was also involved in various civil rights organizations and was an advocate for social justice. He was the first African American artist to gain international acclaim, and he paved the way for other Black artists to gain recognition and success in the art world. Tanner died in 1935 in Arizona at the age of 82.

Hmm. It seems like I never knew my great-grandfather was famous and could paint. This is the dumb kind of mistake you would shake your head at. In genealogy this is called the same name same person mistake. What I got was a tolerable biography of Henry Ossawa Tanner, who was born in 1859 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and died in 1937 in Paris, France. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ossawa_Tanner. Except it got birth and death places wrong. 

I don't know about you, but I am not quite ready to start relying too heavily on AI to solve any of my genealogical problems. It seems AI does make a good indexer but it isn't even close to making a bare minimum genealogist.