The new AI Prompt Builder is a most welcome feature. This morning I gave it a try building a prompt predicated on these criteria (screenshot). Then in Firefox, onto https://chatgpt.com - the free version - pasted the copied prompt, and the results of which you can see in the shared link above.
This new feature in RM11 is great to see. RM11’s first built prompt resulted in this Chatbot’s successful first draft. It also helped in wondering 1) how best in RM to insert notable achievements of an individual?, and then 2) how that individual’s achievements might be piped into the AI Prompt Builder?
I have limited experience so far with RM’s AI Prompt Builder, so that I can’t yet speak to your second question. On your first question, I do that sort of thing with custom defined facts. Mostly, I just use a custom defined fact which I call Narrative. Other RM users do a similar thing but with a different name for the fact such as Story or some such. The name of the fact doesn’t matter all that much, except that with respect to your second question about piping the data into AI Prompt Builder the name of the fact might matter.
I also have a few custom facts that are not as generic as my Narrative fact such as Deed and Land Grant and Tax List and Property Tax and City Directory. These are not “notable achievements” per se, but they are events in a person’s life. My more specific custom facts include a date and place field, but my Narrative fact does not. Rather, any dates and places are included in the body of the note for the Narrative fact. I place the Narrative fact in the correct place in a person’s life using a sort date.
There are some little gotcha’s that may or not be more important in the context of AI Prompt Builder. For example, citation superscripts for facts appear after the date and place and description information and before the note. But my Narrative fact only has a note which places the citation superscript at the very beginning of the note. That looks very unprofessional. I get around this problem by including a short introductory sentence for the Narrative fact in the description field for the Narrative fact. The citation superscript then becomes after the description and before the note. That’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can do. However, at the present time, AI Prompt Builder does not support the description field. Hopefully, this is a simple oversight that is easy to correct rather than there being some deeper reason for not supporting the description field.
There is a generic problem with all of RM’s notes, not just with my Narrative fact, in that notes are just text. The result of the notes just being text is that any names and dates and places mentioned in a note do not appear in a Name Index or a Place Index in any of RM’s reports that support those indexes. In theory, that shouldn’t have anything to do with AI Prompt Builder. But I do wonder if the AI itself will be able to associate names and dates and places from the note in my Narrative fact with other names and dates and places that RM places into the prompt. In other words, I’m wondering if I might need to add a date and place to my Narrative fact in order for my Narrative fact to be used most effectively with an AI.
It doesn’t matter for this discussion, but my current AI of choice is ChatGPT. That’s probably the most popular one right now and that’s the one that Bruce used for demonstration purposes in his AI Prompt Builder video. For those of you who haven’t yet used ChatGPT or any other AI, the capabilities are quite impressive. I wouldn’t have dreamed that level of capability was possible a few years ago. I think what ChatGPT does is even more impressive that things like software that plays chess. My focus in graduate school in computer science back in the 1970’s was AI. I never dreamed back then that it ever could be this smart.
If I may include a personal note, my most notable achiever was my fifth great grandfather Peter Bryan who was one of the authors of Tennessee’s constitution when Tennessee became a state in 1796 and who was then a delegate to Tennessee’s first state legislature when it met in 1797. His signature is on the original Tennessee constitution which is stored in the state’s archives in Nashville. I include that information about Peter Bryan in my RM database by using my Narrative fact.
Great point Jerry. If there was ever such a thing as consensus as to the name for such as custom defined fact, maybe then that name might be baked into RM and by extension available from the AI Prompt Builder. Or maybe allow user selection of any defined fact?
In any case, I appreciate your answer regarding the use of custom defined facts in RM, something that I need to develop more. And most particularly I really like to hear of those examples related to land and legal records.
Experimentation in writing the prompt that includes the text in the custom defined fact and provided to your Chatbot of choice may yield the best answer.
@thejerrybryan and @Kelly I played around a little bit today with the AI Prompt Builder—it is in some ways very impressive and in other ways NOT very impressive at all..
If you’ve never written your own family histories/ biographies, it is very impressive especially if you decide to add historical facts to the data.
If on the other hand, you have written your own, it leaves a lot to be desired–that’s not AI’s fault as it is not accessing your database BUT rather just dry facts given by the prompt.
If you select ALL FACTS, it will include any custom facts..
What it does NOT include is
Any facts SHARED with the person..
Any notes for any fact
Any general notes for a person..
That said-- after you produce the 1st draft of a biography, you could copy your notes and give those to AI to incorporate into the biography BUT AI has a habit of taking a long story and drastically reducing it so that it ends up being nothing more than just a fact like birth/ death-- you end up losing the tone and flavor/ texture of the story— I also noticed that you have to be very specific in your notes as AI MIGHT mix up the info–such as I had in one note mentioned 2 grandkids by name ( but not that they were grandkids) and AI mistook them for the sons of the couple…
Basically if I wasn’t use to writing my own, I would have AI make the 1st draft and then work from there…
