Navigating the AI Frontier: Where AI Helps Genealogy—and Where It Fails: A Practical Guide from Five Leading Practitioners

You asked ChatGPT to translate a German parish record. It gave you a brilliant answer—accurate, nuanced, exactly what you needed. Encouraged, you tried it on the next record. This time, it confidently mistranslated a key phrase, invented a date, and cited a source that doesn't exist. What changed?

Nothing—and everything. AI's capabilities in genealogy ar…