Most of us are aware that artificial intelligence can hallucinate. While working with Google Notebook LM, I ran into a different kind of problem — incorrect information that was not caused by hallucination, but by the AI making assumptions about the historical setting.
I had provided Google Notebook LM with a narrative report for my great-great-grandmother, Mary Foster Crawford, and asked it to generate a brief video about her life. I really liked the video it created, but it included several historical inaccuracies. The video showed:
- the family migrating by wagon from Indiana to Kansas when the railroad was already established
- Dodge City portrayed as a wild-west cowtown when it was actually becoming a settled frontier community for families
- an image of a “Crawford Grocers” storefront even though there was no mention of a grocery in her records
While I immediately recognized these problems, I realized that someone watching the video might not notice the errors. That meant I needed to figure out how to give the AI tool better historical context so it would not make those assumptions.
Since I want to continue using RootsMagic narrative reports as the source for these AI-generated biographies and videos, I decided to add a few historical facts directly into the narrative report. I added these as miscellaneous facts shared between Mary and her husband, using the description field to hold the explanatory sentence.
Below are two of the historical context statements I added:
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad reached Dodge City in September 1872.
Between 1878 and 1884, Dodge City changed from a rough cattle-drive railhead into a more settled town as railroads moved west, farming spread, and the Old West era came to an end. During this time, schools and churches were built as families moved into the community.
To add even more context to Mary’s life, I also added a couple of events to her timeline as a witness to events in her husband’s narrative:
In 1884, James H. Crawford expected his brother, Washington Marion Crawford, along with Washington’s wife Mary and their children, to arrive in Dodge City from Indiana by train.
In September 1884, Mary Foster assisted her husband, Washington Marion Crawford, as landlord of the Iowa House boarding house on Front Street in Dodge City.
After updating the narrative report with these additional details, I generated a new video in Google Notebook LM. This time, the added historical context kept the AI from making incorrect assumptions about travel, the railroad, and life in Dodge City.
Below is the updated brief video.
From this experience, I learned that when using AI tools to generate stories or videos, it may be necessary to add historical context directly into our genealogy reports. The facts in our database may be correct, but without enough background information, AI may fill in the gaps with assumptions that don’t match the actual history.