AI and the future of reunions

In our fast-paced world, family reunion planners have to get creative, both in making our family heritage seem relevant and in holding the attention of reunion-goers. With easy technological distractions in our pockets, a family reunion that merely consists of potluck and conversation in a park pavilion or rented room may no longer prove as effective as in past generations. Since the 1990s, the Internet has gradually revolutionized the way we harness information and communicate with one another. In the past year, however, we have started a new technological revolution that may prove even more momentous: the AI revolution..

WHAT IS AI?

Misconceptions about artificial intelligence abound. Some people fear AI, believing that it will harm humans. However, AI is just a tool we can use to help us solve problems and make our lives easier. Another big misconception is that you have to be tech-savvy to use AI. However, family historians and reunion organizers have used and benefited from AI for years, perhaps without even realizing it. AI powers the record suggestion features offered by major genealogy research websites, as well as the ethnicity and genetic trait prediction features on DNA testing sites. So, what exactly is AI?

Imagine you are attending a family reunion where you meet a lot of people whom you may or may not recognize. You are handed a list of names and photos, and your goal is to identify as many people as possible. At first, you might struggle, but as you meet more people, you start to recognize certain features or patterns that help you identify them. For example, you might notice that your great Aunt Susan always wears a particular style of glasses, or that your distant cousin Fred has a distinctive mustache.

This process of recognizing patterns is similar to how AI works. AI analyzes large amounts of data to find patterns and make predictions or decisions based on those patterns. This is how Ancestry or MyHeritage.com sift through millions of records to pick out ones they think might be relevant to your family tree. Likewise, 23andMe can aggregate hundreds of thousands of genetic profiles to figure out which genes are linked to which traits.

WHAT ARE LANGUAGE MODELS?

While AI has been around and improving gradually for several years, the type of AI that is causing the most buzz this year is called the Large Language Model (LLM). So, imagine now that at that family reunion, you find brainy cousin Brenda — the de facto family historian. As everyone at this family reunion shares stories about their lives and memories, Brenda is the one person who seems to remember everything that everyone said. Brenda can use that knowledge to carry on a conversation with anyone, about any aspect of the family’s history. Brenda is like a Large Language Model AI. An LLM is a computer program that has been trained on vast amounts of text data, like books, articles, and websites, and can generate helpful, relevant, human-sounding responses.

The biggest and most well-known example of consumer-friendly,

LLM-based AI these days is ChatGPT, which you can access at chat.openai.com. ChatGPT is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to understand language and respond to real questions and prompts from real people. It is a bit like having a conversation with a computer. It works by analyzing the words and phrases that people use when they talk, and then uses that information to come up with responses. ChatGPT’s developers have trained it on enormous amounts of text data, so it’s able to understand many different types of language and can respond to a wide range of questions and statements.

For family reunion planners, LLMs like ChatGPT will prove an increasingly useful tool because they help answer questions and provide guidance on things like event planning, activities, storytelling, and more. For example, a family reunion planner could ask a LLM for ideas about fun, family history related activities to hold at the reunion, or could feed the LLM facts about an ancestor and ask it to use those facts to write up a narrative about that ancestor’s life. For these and other reasons, LLMs are a powerful tool that can make communication and planning easier for reunion planners. By using artificial intelligence to understand and respond to people, AI tools like ChatGPT can provide helpful insights and ideas that can help make family reunions even more enjoyable for everyone involved.

How Reunions Magazine Will Help You Stay On The Cutting Edge

Over the next several issues, Reunions magazine is excited to walk you through several of the most popular and powerful AI tools that are at reunion planners’ disposal. These tools can assist with brainstorming and planning, organize your information, create visual aids, transform your family photo albums, and help you make family history breakthroughs that can be shared with your gathered relatives. From ChatGPT, to Perplexity AI, to Midjourney and DALL-E, to Transkribus, to Vivid-Pix, we will use easy-to-understand screenshots and explanations in laymen’s terms to show you how to harness amazing new technologies to incorporate into your reunions and take your gatherings to the next level.

As reunion planners, we can either fight against technological trends, or we can embrace and incorporate them. If we want engagement and connection-building, we can either ask reunion attendees to keep their gadgets stowed away in their pockets (a futile endeavor, perhaps) or we can use those same gadgets as tools to connect cousins, find out more about our family history, and present our heritage.

About the author

Josiah Schmidt, genealogist and president of the Hans Schmidt Family Association, will be helping us understand the new technologies and how they relate to reunions and reunion planning. He holds a BA and MA in History. He is currently a PhD candidate (ABD) in the History Department of Washington University in St.Louis, specializing in Digital Humanities, which is something that definitely did not exist when this editor was in college decades ago! EW