How to use AI to illustrate family history

I have been playing with artificial intelligence (AI; ChatGPT4.o) since June. I am no expert but today I’d like to show you a fun way to use AI to create illustrations.

What do you want to see?

Think of a beloved family story. It does not have to be true. Add as many realistic detail to the story as you can. For example, here is one of mine. I am curious about my great-grandmother, Yip Chin Shee (葉隗氏), (1866-1934). She was the fourth wife of my great grandfather Yip Sang (葉生), and bore him eight children. She left a towering legacy in the lives of her many descendants – not to mention those cheekbones! – yet little is known about her personally.

It’s difficult to research the lives of our female ancestors, and it’s infamously challenging to research historic Chinese women. The family legend is that Chin Shee could drive. I have always imagined her enjoying the freedom and pleasure of driving in Chinatown. Let’s see what we can do with this story, using AI.

Getting started in creating illustrations

To create a realistic scene, AI needs examples. To create my first illustration, I uploaded three photos: the above photo of Chin Shee, an example of a car, and a street scene.

I then gave my instructions. AI needs details:

Role: Instruct AI what role it has in the work. “You are a [describe the role].”

Time: What is the desired year or decade? An era will do.

Geography: Where in the world should the image be set?

Other visuals: If you have a particular scene in mind, describe everything, e.g., day or night, what’s the weather like, mountains or streets.

Clothing and hair: These are important details for an illustration. We notice anachronisms quickly: the too-modern hairstyle, the style of clothing, even the type of shoes.

Here is what I wrote:

You are a historic illustrator of Canadian history. I am providing three photos of a woman, a car, and a street. Please create a coloured illustration of the woman driving the car on this street.

AI created this illustration.

What do you think? Personally, I’m still agog, amazed, and gobsmacked this is even possible. But that’s not all. ChatGPT will allow one free revision. This means that you can ask for it to change any aspect of the image. This is a good time to think critically.

Revise wisely.

What’s wrong with this image? The first thing that jumps out at me is that she’s driving on the wrong side of the road. The second is her hairstyle. She looks fabulous, but 1950s-fabulous, not 1900s-fabulous. The third is her clothing. I love the suit, but I don’t think my great-grandmother would be wearing one in 1900. Fourthly, she seems very young. I double checked her age, and she would be 34 in 1900.

So I gathered these ideas to instruct AI for my second try:

This is a good first draft. To make it more true to life, have the woman drive on the other side of the street. Change her clothing to a traditional cheongsam. Change her hairstyle to be long hair, coiled on the back of her head the way that women dressed their hair in 1900. Also please adjust her age to be about 35 years old.

Isn’t this fun? Sure, the woman may not exactly resemble my great-grandmother (her nose is too pert and lips too thin), her hair is still too modern, and there is a car on the sidewalk, but for a free tool to create a scene for which there are no existing images, AI is a good tool (and one I predict will only get better over time).

Afterword

I’d like to offer some philosophical thoughts on AI. I believe AI is as big a change to our world as the invention of the internet. Love it or hate it, it is already changing everything. I’m as nervous as the next person about the downsides (ex: deepfakes), but here’s the thing: I’m not going to get less nervous by avoiding it. I believe it is incumbent on all of us, and especially genealogy professionals, to be upfront about how we are using AI in our work. If we’re not sure if we are using AI, it’s up to us to figure out how AI is a part of our workflow, and identify it as such.

For example, in a past post, I created a separate category of AI-created sources.

It was once the case that photos didn’t lie. As a photographer and a family historian, I have relied on old photos to show me a world that has disappeared. With AI, I can see a future world where we not only must identify an image as being AI-created, but also when it is not AI-created. In other words, without regulation, we may grow to distrust every image. For this reason, I am not yet comfortable asking AI to create photos, but rather only photo illustrations (and I always label AI-created images).

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on using AI to illustrate family stories.

Thank yous

Thanks this week to the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society (East Bay San Francisco Area) for speaking with me about the images I created for my talk, “My connection to the Chinese Canadian Museum,” presented 12 Sep 2024. I’m looking forward to seeing the coming newsletter, which will feature my first-ever illustration about Yip Sang.

References

Illustrations created using ChatGPT4.0 https://chatgpt.com, accessed 28 Sep 2024.