My son-in-law makes a great deal of use of ChatGPT and will vigourously defend its capabilities. My own experience of AI relates principaly to its use in family history research, and it is in this context that I find that any reliance on it is profoundly disturbing.
Simple queries on the internet these days respond at the top with AI generated results. I find that without exception that these results are wrong. However, the way the information gained by AI is presented appears to be authoratitive and it is only by being knowledgable in the specific area of research that the diecrepancies and absolute errors in the response can be identified. A non-specialist may well accept the AI response to be accurate, and if the respose is repeated, then the mis-information becomes spread more widely, and worringly, it starts to attract a cloak of truthfulness.
The use of AI in places such as Ancestry, etc., I think is not entirley clear, but probably does lie behing the so-called "hints". When I use Ancestry in my research, I find that often the majority of the hints are completely wrong. However, it is unsurprising that these hints are sometimes seen in public member trees accepted without any validation whatsoever, leading in one case to a mother giving birth over one hundred years after she had died! The hints also lead to a reactive and lazy form of research rather than a proactive one where information obtained is forensically evaluated to determine whether or not it supports the research or otherwise. That is not to say, however, that Ancestry's hints do not sometimes provide valuable information from sources that might otherwise be overlooked, and other avenues for research that might not otherwise have been considered.
I general, I have not found AI to be of any particular benefit in my own research; effective and successful research requires, like most things in life, simple dedication and hard work, and not a little imagination.
Please feel free to disagree.
