Scott Crevier's Family History Scott Crevier's Family History
Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged in recent years as a tool that does many things; often what we hear may seem scary or just too techie for us. As a retired I.T. geek, I've been interested in AI and its practical uses. I figured it's time to see what it can do for my genealogy research. I started with two specific needs: improve the quality of old photos and transcribe an old baptism record (in a foreign language).
Here are links to two such tools. There are many others, but these are the ones I started with. Both are free.
▶ Gemini — This is Google's AI tool and so far it's my preferred solution. They have a free version which you already have access to if you have a Gmail account (nothing to install, no new account creation).
▶ ChatGPT — This started out as one of the more popular solutions mentioned in articles and news stories in recent years. They have a free account level which is great for starting out to see if it serves your needs.
To get started, visit one of the above sites. Create an account if you need to. Let's start by just trying to improve an old photo. So, find a photo on your computer that is old and maybe blurry, or maybe it's a scan of a torn picture or newspaper article. Upload the photo to the site and type: "restore this photo."
That's it. Just wait for the results. If you want, go ahead and try both of the above solutions so that you can compare the results. Note also that there is no single right way to do this. You might type something different like, "improve and colorize this picture" or "convert this photo to a cartoon."
I started with the cover photo of the book "Francois", a book about Francois LeGrave, my 2nd great grandfather (see my resources page for more info). I just told it: "restore this photo." Here are the results. To appreciate the detail in the result, be sure to click on the photo below so that you can zoom in and see it up close. So, not only did it significantly improve the picture, but the result is a very high resolution image file, so that you can not only see the detail but it will make a good quality printed photo if you choose to do that. Notice also the small "Gemini" symbol watermark that it placed in the lower right corner of the image; this is important so that you know that the image is AI generated.
For my second task, I uploaded an image of the baptism record of my great grandfather Telesphore Chevalier. It's important to understand exactly what I needed here. If you already have text in a foreign language, it's very easy to paste it into Google Translate and get the English equivalent. However, it's very difficult to even know what the French words are in this record, as it is 100% hand written. So that's why I asked it to first transcribe it and then translate it. The actual instruction I gave it is: "transcribe and translate this baptism record of Telesphore Chevalier."
I was absolutely floored at what it produced. It gave me three sections of text: transcription, translation, and the detailed facts.
The use of A.I. in genealogy research has many critics. But most of the critcisms I've read are from people with inappropriate expectations. Some people seem to think that since it's a computer, the information it provides must be 100% accurate. This is not the proper way to use A.I. in genealogy research.
Let's just look at the two examples above. The enhanced photo of my 2nd great grandfather looks great. But is it an accurate representation of the original? Maybe. There's no way to know unless I have the original here. So I just figure it's as if I asked an artist to paint a portrait from the blurry photo. As for the transcribed baptism record, again, I can't tell you if the result is accurate. Again, I treat it as if I asked a French church official to do the work. It's probably pretty good, but I don't know. But in this case, someone knows. Someone out there reads French better than me, and someone is more familiar with the baptism records from that church than me.
Understand the limitations and then use A.I. for your specific needs to see what you think. If you go into it with appropriate expectations, it can be very helpful. It's often interesting to submit the same task to two or three tools (CoPilot, Perplexity, etc) and look at the differences.