My Amazing Week with AI and Big Projects

Last week, at my local genealogical society meeting, a member mentioned the possibility of taking inventory of everything in the library. I casually suggested, “Just take photos of the books and have AI put them in a table.” I suspect she may have thought I was being a bit unrealistic.

This morning, though, I decided the idea was worth testing before offering to help. I removed the handful of knick-knacks from my shelves and photographed five shelves of genealogy and history books.

My first prompt was as follows:

Inventory these books, I want to start at the top shelf that would be the number one shelf, the middle shelf number two, and the bottom shelf number three. If you can’t read the name of the book or it doesn’t have a title or author on the binding, just write "blank."

Note that this was done on my phone, and I used the mic to give the prompt. I had to retake one section as it needed a better photo. I followed up with shelves four and five, then requested that the inventory be listed by shelf in a table I could copy into a Word document. The result was a near-perfect inventory. Anything left blank did not have a title on the binding.

You can see a portion below. This is all a little surreal. What would have been a big, time-consuming project—not to mention the dust—is now a four-page Word document listing most of my genealogy books. I never had any intention of doing this.

Now I need to fill in a few blanks and get rid of the dust.

Amazing!

This wasn’t the only amazing project.

I serve as the Education Committee chairperson for the Virginia Beach Genealogical Society. Most months, we offer an in-person Lunch and Learn program. As we began planning for next year, we had eight possible topics and needed to decide who would teach each.

Instead of asking someone to create and teach an entire two-hour class from scratch, I thought there had to be a better way. We could use a short video, a selected video segment, or a podcast for the teaching portion, then spend most of the session on discussion and hands-on practice.

I entered the topics into ChatGPT, suggested a few places to look for videos and podcasts, and asked it to find two options for each topic, preferably around thirty minutes long. Without my asking, AI also suggested a simple format for each session:

10 minutes — introduce the skill and why it matters

20–30 minutes — video or selected excerpt

10 minutes — group discussion

45–60 minutes — hands-on practice with participants’ own research

10–15 minutes — share one takeaway or next step

Then I simply asked, “Can this be organized in a spreadsheet or Word document?” AI created both. I preferred the Word document. In addition to an easy-to-understand format, AI created practice activities for each topic. We are not completely done. We still need to evaluate the videos and review the practice activities, but we already have much less work to do. It looks very promising.

AI-generated (ChatGPT) garden concept based on a photo and instructions provided by DQuinn, May 2026.

My last project was not genealogical, but AI gave me more amazing results. I am trying to redo a garden bed in my backyard and turn it into something attractive but fairly easy to care for. I uploaded a photo of the current bed and explained which shrubs were being removed, which plants I wanted to keep, and what I hoped to add—much of which I already had elsewhere in my yard. The tall tree in the AI-generated image is not mine, and the birdhouse it suggested is too expensive, but the overall plan is almost exactly what I had pictured.

If you would like to learn more about the families I research, follow my Facebook page, where I share each post along with other genealogical finds.

Diana

© 2026