Mori Magazine

Preserving Family Stories with AI

For many of us, learning about our family history and preserving those stories for future generations is deeply important. However, actually sitting down to write a family history can be an intimidating task. Where do you even start? How do you construct a narrative from disparate facts, stories, and photographs? AI technology offers new opportunities to assist with compiling family histories while also carefully avoiding plagiarism.

AI tools are now available that can help organize historical documents, photographs, family trees, and other source materials to build a timeline of key events. This provides a framework to then construct a narrative. The AI assistant can suggest potential storylines to pursue based on available materials and even generate draft paragraphs and sections. However, it does not simply copy or rework existing materials. The AI is designed to synthesize key facts and ideas into original prose for inclusion in the family history.  

The human author then reviews these AI-generated passages, edits them for tone and style, adds additional context or personal touches, and approves final versions before publication. At each stage, the content is run through plagiarism checks to ensure total originality. Any questionable passages are flagged by the system and reworked or rewritten completely.

By partnering with an AI assistant in this way, family historians can be more productive and creative. The AI alleviates much of the grunt work of organizing, structuring, and laying the groundwork for writing so the human can instead focus on imparting their familial wisdom, memories, and voice. This leads to preserving one-of-a-kind family histories that will enlighten future generations. And it's all done legally and ethically thanks to robust plagiarism checks along the way.