Just Because AI Can Do It, Should I?
An Experiment in Renaming Genealogy Files with ChatGPT Have you ever looked at your genealogy files and wished they were better organized? Have you ever considered renaming hundreds—or even thousands—of files so that you could tell what they contained without opening them? I have! Recently, a post in the Facebook group Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence caught my attention. The writer described using ChatGPT and Claude to process genealogy documents. Their AI agents could extract information from documents, rename the files, place them in appropriate folders, and create structured data files containing the extracted information. That sounded intriguing! Could I use AI to improve the organization of my genealogy files? I decided to experiment. My Original Filing System When I began researching my family history, genealogy was largely a paper-based activity. I traveled to libraries, archives, and courthouses, made photocopies, and organized those papers in folders. For organizi...