That sounds like a really cool project and a really interesting way to preserve family history.
I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.
I am usually grossed out by AI when it fakes humanness, but not here, I think.
Steve Jobs saw the computer as a bicycle for the mind, a way to enable us to do more and be more. This is the metaphor against which I measure all technology.
I think that in this case, it helped someone make something deeply human by abstracting the tedium away. It did what a computer should do: aid a human with their task.
Technology has been feeling like a devil's bargain for a while now. This was a rare glimpse of how I used to see tech, and of why I was so excited about it.
What makes this example land differently for me is that the intent stays human all the way through
Yes! What do we want technology to do for us? In my opinion one important promise that was never fully realized is helping us to live a more enriched life. Social media does help people stay connected but it brings a lot of negatives that are well-known at this point.
If you build this encyclopedia as a purely robotic collector of facts that nobody reads, it’s probably more dystopian horror.
If you build it as a fun inner loop that reconnects you with people and memories and makes you more human, then it’s great.
We should endeavor to craft experiences that do the latter; right now we are back in the hacker days when small teams can build big new ideas, and big tech hasn’t taken over.
I love Robin Sloan's idea of apps as home-cooked meals. This is the only thing about AI that doesn't make me want to burn a datacenter to the ground.
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
>We should endeavor to craft experiences
It'd be better if we all turned this tech off and went to be with other people.
I don’t even know how much it helps people stay connected anymore since the shift to mobile. I was in an antique store recently and came upon a vintage “correspondence desk” which is basically a desk specialized for sorting and preparing mail. Back when people used to keep in touch by writing letters to each other this is what people with active remote friendships did. They’d spend a couple of hours at this desk reading letters they’ve received and sitting down to compose replies.
This is basically how social media was when you needed a computer to go online. You’d sit and sift through your feeds and there’d be message chains you respond to. You’re not really doing anything else while you’re doing that and you’re putting it out of mind once you step away. When Twitter first started getting big it was sort of a joke that people are talking to you while on the toilet. The idea that you were only ever half engaged with anything you’re doing was remarkable enough to be worth pointing out instead of taken for granted.
It’s just a lot more focused and intentional when you’re dedicating time and headspace to the task instead of “microdosing” on connection via a dopamine lottery. Even if you took away the ads and the interpolation of creator-content crowding out the connections with people you actually know, I think designing for an infinite scroll just inherently makes the thing less human-centered. It sets it up so you’re interacting with these atomized bits of ‘content’ rather than people.
That is because platforms both enable us and exploit us, they exploit both those who create/comment and those who read. They perform a necessary function but extract the value from it for their own good.
I agree. I do admire the concept as a framing device to engage with your family history, but the "AI" part strikes me in a wrong way.
There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds better left forgotten, different framings, and all that emotional labor of trying to choose what and how you want to remember.
The use of LLMs for creating a shared view for some information isn't inherently morally dubious-processing and storing data is what computers have been doing for generations-except for the privacy implications, but letting this projection of a mega-corporation usurp the role of narrator for such a deeply personal story feels wrong on an instinctual level.
Personal wiki's impersonally compiled. I gauge LLMs for the extent they fray the social fabric that hold people and society together. And the way AI is introduced for max disruption causes me to be generally against the technology, despite that there are also obvious merits. Here it depends on how much value, say, a family gets out of reading in their family encyclopedia.
It is a nice idea, and I can imagine how it may serve to strengthen the family's social cohesion, in a time where everyone is busy doing the rat race. Though I'd not use it as "encyclopedia", a cold-hearted fact recorder, more like more a social-focused "Our Family Diaries" and would be much better served by family members writing down their own experiences.
I’m curious, do you agree with the statement, “it would be better for this personal wiki not to exist, than for it to have been built with AI”?
Because without AI it probably wouldn’t exist.
thank you :)
I understand the bittersweet feeling because I did all the editorial work for the wedding page and the first few others and I did feel like a historian trying to connect the dots after stumbling into some primary/secondary materials and spending a couple months doing all the editorial work
after I began experimenting with agents, it sped up my process that otherwise would've taken many more months for every page given that the kinds of data sources also increased over time
I did still spend significant amounts of time like a wikipedia contributor would deciding on what to keep, enhance or delete from the page based on my own personal preferences and what I was comfortable with seeing on the page
the dystopic feeling is also fair and unsettling, I think this ironically also made me realize how important safeguarding my personal data is, we leave digital trails of ourselves everywhere so a powerful agent can string them together to create a story of who you are
It reads like AI was just collaborator. Author did the fun part, AI did the tedious connecting of band records, Shazam recordings to places, songs.
That's the use-case I enjoy with AI. Let it do the heavy-lifting, I'll enjoy the rest.
Making those connections are what builds a narrative: writing history is looking at the sources and constructing a narrative around that you think is significant. And if you really do find a connection so tedious, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the, for example, list of songs played one night at some event doesn't have any significance at all, it's just an unimportant detail pointlessly padding out the story.
AI here is not a tool, it's the author, or at the very least a co-author that greatly influences the human author. It selects what's important and then writes the narrative. It has its own biases. The narrative isn't based on what's personally important to the human creator, but rather the availability of data, those sources that are digitized. And then in turn the output shapes the human author's own perspective, changing even what the human will write on their own.
100% agree I just had exactly the same reaction. I love the idea and would definitely like to do the first part e.g. documenting key people (family members and other important relations etc), key events like weddings etc.
What a lovely resource, especially if it reflects stories and recollections given by the subjects themselves.
The idea of having AI do it all is really off-putting IMO. For a number of reasons:
1) You lose the curation. You'll inevitably see a bias towards documenting based on the quality and availability of the sources as opposed to the significance of the event. E.g. you might not have much info about some really special childhood event you or someone else remembers, but does that mean it shouldn't be documented? Conversely, I don't want a 10,000 word essay on (to quote one of the titles from the post) "The 3D printing saga" -- just because I happen to have hundreds of WhatsApp messages on the subject.
2) I don't want to fact check every detail. Personally, I think if grandad (RIP) would have told me he one surfed a 20ft wave of the coast of Filey, Yorkshire. I don't need a correction that it was unlikely to be that high. If these things are partly being done "in memoriam" then I think it's really important to preserve the experiences, stories and recollections if the people we're trying to remember. Dates etc are fine to validate and correct. But there's an element of subjectivity to memories that is really special IMO. What even is reality at the end of the day? We're all just one big collective story we tell ourselves.
3) It feels soulless. Enough said on this one, I think people know what I mean
I don't know that "preserve" is the correct term here. It's certainly an interesting way to collate family history, but this encyclopedia will last only as long as the OP is interested in and able to maintain it. Once OP gets bored, or falls ill, or dies, unless there's someone else interested in it, the history is gone, reverted back to oral memory.
If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.
I share this dilemma too. Just a thought -- I feel less okay with AI processing "data made for humans" (i.e. the images themselves, audio recordings of speech) and more ok with it processing "data made for software" (exif data, shazam logs).
We are the last human AI free generation that lives on. It's your basic human instincts kicking in.
there is an activation energy cost to so many activities - so those things just never got done. many times it is because the cost-benefit wasn't clear at the start (unknown unknowns) so it never got done. kudos to op for experimenting and showing us one way of making something like this happen.
Normally, memory work is you pulling things out of your mind. Here, it's the system pushing things back at you
Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the parallel work?
IMO it does not. At least to me the meaning and value of something is in the creative human design behind it, not the tools used to build it. I don’t think AI changes much there. It’s a (very powerful) tool but still IMO the value lies with the creativity and skill of the operator.
I had the same reaction, but to me, it seems like a downside of automation and scale in general. I'm analogizing in my head to experiences when I was a teenager I used to go to skid row in LA and hand out cash to random homeless strangers because that felt like a good thing to do, but as a late-30s adult decades later dealing with spine injuries where walking was my only available form of exercise, I lived in another downtown with a large homeless problem and became overwhelmed any time I went out for a walk and never gave anything to anybody, simply because there were so many people asking that if I stopped to pay attention to all of them, I'd have spent all of my time doing that and none of it actually walking. Or the businesses that feel like it's well-meaning and harmless and helpful to them if I can give just 30 seconds of my time for feedback on how I felt about the transaction. Fine when that's really just 30 seconds here or there, but when it's every single business I've ever made so much as a two dollar transaction with over the past decade, now it's 30 seconds time 500 businesses a day, and if I paid any attention to their e-mails and texts, it would be all I ever do.
Similar with this, when you're hand curating old photographs and personally interviewing relatives, you're learning something. You're deepening relationships and your own personal understanding of these people you love, spending time reflecting on your own life. But when you send an LLM at it and it produces the volume of real Wikipedia, now an automated process is producing more text than you can ever possibly read if all you did for the rest of your life is read.
why is there need for an emotional reaction? It's just a tool. Philosophically, it's no different than using photoshop to touch up old photos. It's just a more "high-tech" version.