Despite Limitations Artificial Intelligence Will Benefit Genealogy

 

Although many of the news stories about artificial intelligence focus on its negative aspects, genealogy will greatly benefit from some of those same supposed defects. When it comes down to it, genealogy is all about information. Over the past 40 years, I have spent a huge amount of my time looking for documents and records or plodding through documents and records trying to find one piece of information about an ancestor. The combination of handwriting recognition, computer-aided all-word indexing, and the continued increase in the availability of high-resolution digital imaging, will immensely increase my own personal capability to do an increased amount of research. 

Presently, the entire international genealogical community is awash in valuable genealogical information. One example is the claim made by Ancestry.com at RootsTech 2023, that this one company will add 50 billion new digitized records during the year. See https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/annual-ancestry-update. Meanwhile, almost every genealogical company is claiming features enhanced with artificial intelligence. From my perspective, all the hype about artificial intelligence boils down to the fact that it is only an extension of technology that has been developing for well over 200 years since Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage teamed up to program the first computer. The current programs touted breakthroughs are only possible because of the increase in computer memory and speed and the development of the vast world-wide internet.

One of the most dramatic examples of the impact of artificial intelligence is the recent emergence of success in using handwriting recognition technology.  The completion of the first level all-word indexing of the 1950 Census in nine days by Ancestry.com is the prime example. See "Ancestry® Proprietary Artificial Intelligence-Powered Handwriting Recognition Technology Processes Over 150 Million Records from the 1950 U.S. Census in Only 9 Days."

Mostly unnoticed by genealogists, FamilySearch.org and others are using handwriting recognition to index millions of records every week. In February of 2022, FamilySearch reported that they had used Computer Aided Indexing using artificial intelligence to index the following:

As of 7 February 2022 FamilySearch has processed the following via CAI:

• Images: 34,539,076
• Records: 174,022,816

Every week FamilySearch processes new natural image groups that fit the criteria above: this is done by updating the metadata of existing natural image groups and through new image acquisitions. Users should return regularly to determine if new image groups have been processed via CAI.

See FamilySearch Computer Aided Indexing

I have not been able find any statistics about the indexing since that date. 

A recent article entitled, "How FamilySearch is using the future to discover the past with AI," provides some additional information. Ultimately, this technology will continue to mature, and the number of indexed documents will increase. There is a need to review the CAI indexed documents, and this will ultimately replace the human involvement in direct indexing. 

Another amazing technological advance is being made with Computer-Generated Trees. This is defined as:

A collection of family trees created by a computer. The computer interprets historical records to construct a tree for a particular location and time period.

See https://www.familysearch.org/search/genealogies/collection/10000130 

This project was mentioned during the FamilySearch What's New presentation by Craig Miller at RootsTech 2023. See https://youtu.be/WwqxwC1eIDg

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the innovative technology that will affect genealogy in the very near future.