At RootsTech, someone I spoke with mentioned choosing a theme ahead of time to help narrow down classes and Expo hall experiences — what a great idea! Her focus was DNA and AI. Looking back, mine was clearly AI Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tools, which happened to be the topic of the class I taught in person and the common thread running through all the booths I visited. (Last year, in 2025, I taught about this...
I’m excited to share that we have updated our Research Like a Pro with AI genealogy workbook! This second edition has all the latest updates in how artificial intelligence can be used for genealogical research and writing. What took the longest to update was understanding ALL the new features released by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity in the last year. The pace this technology is advancing is astonishing. Comparison Report: Research Like a Pro with...
About a year or two ago, I asked ChatGPT to convert a metes and bounds land description into a land plat drawing. It was not able to do so correctly. Yetserday, I tried again and the results were astounding! I compared three scenarios: ChatGPT 5.2 Auto with a short, simple prompt ChatGPT 5.2 Auto with a longer meta and chain-of-thought prompt ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking with a short, simple prompt I used a deed I...
Exploring the use of artificial intelligence chatbots for creating written content is the new frontier – full of uncertainties and unknowns. Organizations that once prohibited the use of LLMs for research papers are now allowing them, as long as authors are fact-checking the output and attempting to cite potentially copyrighted materials included in the output. In 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning prohibited the use of LLMs in their call for papers. In 2024,...
In episode #300 of Research Like a Pro, Diana and Nicole discuss the evolution of their genealogy research methodology, Research Like a Pro (RLP), over the years, focusing on past, present, and future perspectives. Past Developments: Technology: Initially, Diana and Nicole utilized tools like PAF and Ancestral Quest for family trees, Google Sheets for research logs, and Evernote for notes. They also used a lot of paper files and some digital files for organization. Genealogy...