A major new AI capability

[Zaphod99]

Ancestry hints are atrocious, and generally the AI summary at the top of a search is equally bad, it's a tool, it is coming, it is here to stay, and if you haven't tried it recently you should persist, as month on month they are getting very much better. They won't do the work for us, but they are tools that need a craftsman to use. I'm not trying to sell it I'm just trying to help.

Zaph

[coombs]

AI is like something that Del Boy Trotter would sell you  , just not necessarily stolen, but may not work properly.

On a side note I do like the recently new FamilySearch text search which can help seek out scans of words in historic documents but it is still in infancy and not infallible. You type "Joe Bloggs" into the search feature, choose a country and date range and get some results.

[Erato]

" I do like the recently new FamilySearch text search"

Yes, me too.  I've turned up several interesting items with the text search.

[IanStB]

In this context, AI is reliant on the quality of the records it is searching. As we all know, records are incomplete or misleading and a lot of family trees on Ancestry are the product of wishful thinking and bad inferences (I've lost count of the number of times it has been obvious that someone has relied on secondary sources rather than primary ones and fallen into quite serious error.) In my case, I have one branch of the family in C19 Nottingham who consistently told untruths to officialdom, typically to cover up illegitimacies or, in one case, bigamy, and that's only really apparent when one looks at primary sources.

Another example I've run across too often is researchers forgetting that names were often reused in an era of significant perinatal and infant mortality and the Joe or Josephine Soap baptised in 1756 may not be the individual who married in 1782 despite the same name and the same parents.

So whatever the claimed capabilities of AI, and even if those claims are true, it is a problem if it does not follow the golden rule - never trust what you see on Ancestry and never forget that some records are missing or as yet untranscribed. Relying on it is, in that sense, as problematic as relying on other researchers. If it throws up hints and possible research avenues that's all well and good, but it is no substitute for doing the work of corroborating and verifying or, as I do on Ancestry, clearly marking some 'facts' as either provisional or unverified placeholders.

(edited for typos)

[David Nicoll]

Hi,
  An interesting question. Thechnically you have been able to do this kind of thing for a long while.
  But it is against the T’s and C’s of your contract, so I think you would loose access pretty quickly.
  It frustrates me greatly that all the sites don’t use the possibilities more. However that is probably down to privacy issues. I suspect that a well trained AI could these days more or less instantly come up with pretty convincing trees for 90% of our DNA matches.
   You can do a lot by sheer slog, with say Pro-Tools, but it is against the slog, but then also where would be the fun in that!
   MyHeritage and Ancestry both have there cut down versions with Theries and Thrulines but I am sure there are very impressive things behind the scenes, but then you get to privacy.
   We all see this every day with private trees and people who don’t respond to contacts for whatever reason.
   It is all very much a Pandora’s Box. Be careful of what you wish for!

Happy Hunting

[coombs]

I would say that all surviving baptism records (church, NC, workhouse baptisms etc) for, lets say Norfolk 1680 to 1720 probably only are about 70 to 75% of all baptisms that ever took place in that county in those 40 years. And even then, you have to wonder how many were never baptised in those 40 years. There will be many baptisms 1680-1720 in Norfolk that have not survived due to lost records, parish registers for a certain parish not surviving that far back, gaps in PR's, destroyed records etc.

[Biggles50]

I have believed for quite a while that the younger generation is being dumbed down by all the dross that is fed to them and by an education system that does not teach them to think.

I am an Engineer and worked in the Building industry for years and the standard today is nothing like it was, it is the same with every other Profession.

AI is only going to make the young rely even more on a computer programme than their own brain.

It will not bode well for the future.

[degenerate]

An 'historical society' in an area where I have some genealogical dealings, found a reference to a particular woman. They had no idea who she was, so one of their number evidently used ChatGPT or equivalent and prompted it to find a connection between the name and the locality, which it did.  It contrived a match between a one-time landowner and a distant relative but caveated it that it was speculative. The caveat went out the window and they deemed this as a proclamation of the Oracle.

I did warn them this identification was highly flawed (for a number of easily verifiable reasons and also pointed to previous research that someone else had done 30 years ago) but they weren't having it and politely told me to shove it. These are adult people that should know better but they are beholden to the new AI overlords without understanding how it works and what the limitations are.  I don't know if they ever did retract or caveat this identification but I've left them to it.

[alan o]

In a previous job in the NHS Primary care, there was an initiative to replace all paper patient records.  The ides was to pay a company millions of pounds to scan and transcribe them all onto the NHS network.  Having seen what AI does to will transcripts where is makes things up or fits the closest thing it thinks to be right, the idea the NHS will do that to very faded writing by a profession known for their bad handwriting in medical jargon and bespoke abbreviations (NFB mean anything to anyone in Somerset?) fills me with angst.