My Week with AI: Podcasts, a PowerPoint, and a Timeline

Finding photos for my blog and presentations is much easier with AI. Simply imagine and
describe your photo. I asked Meta AI to create a fall scene with someone raking and
listening to a podcast. 

Two weeks ago, I posted My Week with AI: Citations, YouTube, eBay, a Will Transcription, and a Spreadsheet. That was my first post about AI, and I plan to share something I’ve done with AI at least monthly. I learn something new every time I use it, and this past week has been no different. Here are a few of my AI learning experiences from the past week.

Podcasts

My yard chores often translate into listening to podcasts and audiobooks. I always look forward to and often replay two genealogy podcasts: The Family History AI Show with Steve Little and Mark Thompson and Research Like a Pro Genealogy Podcast with Diana Elder and Nicole Dyer. Diana and Nicole have integrated AI into many of their recent episodes, while Steve and Mark's podcast focuses entirely on AI's role in genealogy. These aren't the only genealogy podcasts I listen to—there are plenty of great options. If you want to listen to genealogy podcasts, check out the Genealogy Podcasts page at ConferenceKeeper.org for many wonderful choices.

PowerPoint

I have a 60-minute how-to presentation on FamilySearch that I need to trim down to 30 minutes for one of my local genealogical society's activities. I decided to try Perplexity, a new-to-me AI platform, to help with the task. It gave me useful suggestions, including what to put on each slide and how long to spend on them. But when I asked it to create the slides, I was told it couldn't.

Just for fun, I tried the same prompts in ChatGPT. The results were similar, but ChatGPT actually created slides. However, after opening the PowerPoint from ChatGPT, I found that it consisted of only one slide with just a little text. 

Determined not to give up, I tried a different approach—I asked ChatGPT to create slides based on its own suggestions. The results were quite amusing. I had forgotten how much ChatGPT struggles to spell words on images.

I will definitely be creating my own PowerPoint slides!

A Timeline

I am a firm believer in timelines. I've been working hard on my Plymouth, Massachusetts, Reed family and created two timelines in Word documents for this family. I asked ChatGPT to extract the information from both documents and add it to an Excel spreadsheet with columns for dates, events, locations, and notes. 

I now have a nice readable Excel document, but it wasn't a quick process—it took over an hour to analyze the information. The first spreadsheet only captured 27 out of the 87 items from the timelines. I felt like I was constantly nagging ChatGPT to add or adjust entries. In the end, however, ChatGPT put together a more user-friendly document in less time than if I had done it manually.

AI may not always get everything right, but it’s helping me streamline my research and uncover new possibilities. Give it a try—it just might surprise you! 

If you want to know more about the families I research, click here to like my Facebook page. There, you will see each post and other genealogical finds. 

Diana

© 2024 

ChatGPT, "Essential FamilySearch Resources," Slide Illustrations, OpenAI DALL·E, October 10, 2024.

Meta AI, "Fall Picture with iPod," Digital Artwork, October 9, 2024. Artificially generated image of a fall scene.