AI and family history

 I've dabbled in family history.

I wouldn't ever style myself as a genealogist, but during the pandemic when you couldn't go anywhere or do anything as  both a distraction and as a way of keeping my research skills up to speed I dabbled.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one to do this, and like a lot of people I signed up to one of the online family history behemoths.

Now, the one I signed up to, MyHeritage, had a lot of quite useful link building tools to automate searches and build family trees, and this is probably a situation where AI might be helpful in flagging spurious leads and resolving inconsistencies.

I'd bailed from big online family history companies before AI really became a thing, so I've no direct experience of the tools currently available, but at the time I bailed they were touting ways to colorise old photographs and also to assemble images of family groups by combining various group photographs.

Hopefully the exif data on the resulting images would make it plain that it was a synthetic image, but one can see the potential for mischief - 'oh look, there's great aunt Vera with Trotsky' - and the like.

Especially confusing if indeed great aunt Vera might actually have worked in Trotsky's office - think of the rabbit holes that could lead to.

Then this morning I came across the following toot:

So people are actually generating artificial images and using them as profile pictures for uncle Cuthbert.

At one level it's harmless if there's no identifiable photograph of Cuthbert, on another one it's something that makes me uncomfortable.

Some people in my family tree were undoubtedly black and some were mixed race.  And while I havn't pieced together all the evidence to say one way or the other, I may have Maori cousins.

The use of these AI tools is dangerous as it would allow people to airbrush history.

One of the reasons I have mixed race cousins is that a distant relation of mine owned slaves in Jamaica.

Not a pleasant thing to admit to, but there's no denying history.

And for that reason, I think there needs to be an understanding that manipulated images and generated images need to be clearly watermarked as such - yes of course sticking images together for a Christmas card is fine as a bit of fun, but we've got to be clear that it's only a bit of computer generated fun ...