When I sat in on my first BA meeting, I found myself reminded of that which I know that I (and others) need to remind (still) others in the current AI panic. As you may have guessed, I (and others) need to remind (still) others to what you put into AI is exactly what AI gives you back (including with, per the example with the meeting attendees received, AI-generated images). I, after all, once used an AI generator for images on Twitter.
As I recounted in the meeting, I found myself responsible for putting accurately into the AI generator what limited information I have about my paternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother. After all, I could not depend on AI to give me an estimate of what she may have looked like if I did not dependably give AI the information that I had. I needed to describe her as I knew her to have been:
1) a frum Crypto Jew.
2) a 5’3” Sefardi-Ashkenazi daughter of a kohen whom was born in Bosse, Russia-occupied Poland, and died in Sugar Notch, Pennsylvania at the age of 51.
3) a woman whom was born on June 26, 1882 and died after a difficult life (which included rape and the loss of four children as well as a husband) on April 6, 1936.
4) a grey-eyed brunette.
Based on the information that I gave* and based on my knowledge of (as I explained in the meeting) what her son Anthony and grandson Jack looked like (as well as what, for example, other relatives of hers looked and look like), I chose this AI-generated image and (when I used it on my family tree and otherwise) explain at the image portrays what she may have looked like based on what process are utilized to come up with it.
Interestingly, if the AI generator did not generate a possible image of her with makeup, it could have well generated an image of her with nephritis-induced flushing (and you would have to know that she died of nephritis to speculate on that).
I would have to go back and find the original tweet thread, although – as Ancestry allows limited captions — I may have given more of a description than what is shown here.
Conversely and for the same reasons—i.e., information input and discernment—I could not conclusively discern what my great-great-grandfather may have looked like.
Meanwhile, I hope that anyone that has an actual picture of her comes forward with it – partly, so that I can see if I correctly had an AI image generated and carefully chosen. Besides, mainly, I want to see what Great-Great-Grandma actually looked like.
*At the time of this writing, I did not have the original Twitter thread in front of me, as I generated the images with an AI Twitter bot.
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