Initial AI Journey Results (ChatGPT, Prometheus, Bard)
From waitlist to whoa, my outcomes were not as expected.
Family History Correction:
- ❌ The Rumor: Family lore suggested my grandmother, Edra, appeared in a Superman movie.
- ✅ The Fact: Family discussions have confirmed she was not in a Superman movie. She is said to have appeared instead in a movie with Bing Crosby.
I’ve always liked to play with the latest and greatest technology trends. In fact, I was an early beta tester for Gmail back when it was invite-only in 2004 and still have my original Gmail account from high school. My family has also been searching for my maternal grandmother due to my mother being a foster child since my mother and father met long before I was born. We recently ran across some of her death information, so have some, but not all information as well as some word of mouth from contacts. To satisfy both my curiosity for new tech and genealogy, I used AI tools to investigate a long-standing rumor that my grandmother was in a Superman movie. (Update: We have since proven this rumor false; she is said to have been in a movie with Bing Crosby, not Superman.) I will chronicle my experience with these tools below.
From our collective family research, we know that Edra lived in St. Louis, Missouri in 1954. If you search Google you come up empty for results, but on Bing, it is another story. Bing when searching for “edra louise ackermann (deaver) residence 1954” returns a result at the top that links to an Ancestry.com page that I created with her information on it. This result shows that while both ChatGPT and Bard could not decipher who the person was, Prometheus was actively searching the web and returning real results.
Now to expand on the question to see if the chat bots that are still in the running (sorry ChatGPT) can decipher who her husband was at the time she got married to my grandfather in 1959 according to public records from the City of St. Louis. I have viewed the photographed copy of the marriage records index ranging from 1954-1959 and verified that my information is accurate.
First, we’ll explore the output from Google Bard who did not fare so well in the accuracy department and may have been hallucinating a bit. I’ll outline the interaction below and let you be the judge.
First, it stated that she was married in 1954, which we cannot find any records of. All records from the City of St. Louis point to 1959 as the marriage date to Roy Deaver. I asked what the source of the information was and it stated that it came from FamilySearch.org. This is a website that I often use to view public records for free because you can search the transcribed records and then view the original digitized copy to verify if there are any discrepancies. The website, as well as the City of St. Louis Vitals Web Portal, confirm the date in 1959 that I currently have in my records.
After pushing for Bard to give me the link, it told me that it could not do so because “I am not programmed to assist with that.” I find this to be odd considering that it was able to search information, but then not back up where it had found it. This further leads me to believe that it was unable to find full information and started creatively writing to fill in the blanks and make something believable.
After Bard fell apart, I tested Bing’s Prometheus. Although Prometheus had fared best when searching for Edra’s birth and death dates, and returned the Ancestry.com result from my family tree entry, it did not fare well in this endeavor. Upon entering my prompt of “When did she marry Roy Deaver?”, the bot quickly translated my question into relevant search terms and then returned a result similar to the first with an additional message. This additional message stated that it could not find any information about her marriage to Roy Deaver and asked if it could help with anything else.
Seeing that Prometheus had an auto-generated prompt of “What other information do you have about Edra L. Ackermann?” I clicked the button and was rewarded with approximately the same information as before and a prompt asking if it could assist with anything else.
In conclusion, while the AI chatbots may be all the rage at the moment, they are just another tool to put in your pocket and pull out as needed. As always, take what you find on the web with a grain of salt and do your due diligence as you always have and you should be fine.
In the meantime, continue to play with your tech toys and explore the advances we see every day. I know I had a blast testing these new systems against what I already knew to be true and prompting them to see where they got their information from. For now at least, we can say that these seem to put the artificial in Artificial Intelligence.
