About a week ago I signed up for an online class through NGS which teaches how to leverage AI for genealogy. As part of the homework, we were asked to use ChatGPT to summarize a newspaper article about an ancestor and then have it write a biographical sketch. I didn’t follow the homework exactly (it asked to use an article with three events in an ancestor’s life) because I’m currently working on a family history for someone close to me and wanted to try this out on an article I plan to use for that history book. I have embedded…
Category: Writing
Making a Family History Book Using Canva vs MS Word
Up to now I have always used Microsoft (MS) Word to put together family history books. I really like and am comfortable with MS Word, and the books have always looked great when published. To get my work into print, I have mainly used a publishing service like Lulu. If I create a book for people who do not want it printed, I share the document in digital format as an Adobe Acrobat PDF. More recently I have been thinking of creating a less intense publication meaning I want to highlight main events in a family history and include more…
“Programming” ChatGPT to Write a Story
Here’s an update on my continuing efforts to explore using ChatGPT and other AI tools to create stories for the Stories Behind the Stars project. After my last attempt, I was thinking that perhaps this could work if someone could program it to write the type of story I am looking for. But then I saw a Tweet by @thatroblennon which made me realize AI tools like ChatGPT can be programmed just by talking to them. This was somewhat of a revelation to me. So I decided to try my experiment again by first “programming” what I wanted. After several…
Using ChatGPT to Write Stories
Over the last year, I have been volunteering with Stories Behind the Stars (SBTS) to write stories of those from the U.S. who lost their lives in World War II serving in the military. So far, I have completed 43 stories – all but one about men who were from the area around my hometown. With over 22,000 fallen members just from Illinois that leaves a lot of stories left to write. Fortunately there are many others working on this effort, and for fallen members from some states like Utah or who fought in specific battles, all stories have been…