That sounds like a really cool project and a really interesting way to preserve family history.
I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.
I am usually grossed out by AI when it fakes humanness, but not here, I think.
Steve Jobs saw the computer as a bicycle for the mind, a way to enable us to do more and be more. This is the metaphor against which I measure all technology.
I think that in this case, it helped someone make something deeply human by abstracting the tedium away. It did what a computer should do: aid a human with their task.
Technology has been feeling like a devil's bargain for a while now. This was a rare glimpse of how I used to see tech, and of why I was so excited about it.
I agree. I do admire the concept as a framing device to engage with your family history, but the "AI" part strikes me in a wrong way.
There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds better left forgotten, different framings, and all that emotional labor of trying to choose what and how you want to remember.
The use of LLMs for creating a shared view for some information isn't inherently morally dubious-processing and storing data is what computers have been doing for generations-except for the privacy implications, but letting this projection of a mega-corporation usurp the role of narrator for such a deeply personal story feels wrong on an instinctual level.
100% agree I just had exactly the same reaction. I love the idea and would definitely like to do the first part e.g. documenting key people (family members and other important relations etc), key events like weddings etc.
What a lovely resource, especially if it reflects stories and recollections given by the subjects themselves.
The idea of having AI do it all is really off-putting IMO. For a number of reasons:
1) You lose the curation. You'll inevitably see a bias towards documenting based on the quality and availability of the sources as opposed to the significance of the event. E.g. you might not have much info about some really special childhood event you or someone else remembers, but does that mean it shouldn't be documented? Conversely, I don't want a 10,000 word essay on (to quote one of the titles from the post) "The 3D printing saga" -- just because I happen to have hundreds of WhatsApp messages on the subject.
2) I don't want to fact check every detail. Personally, I think if grandad (RIP) would have told me he one surfed a 20ft wave of the coast of Filey, Yorkshire. I don't need a correction that it was unlikely to be that high. If these things are partly being done "in memoriam" then I think it's really important to preserve the experiences, stories and recollections if the people we're trying to remember. Dates etc are fine to validate and correct. But there's an element of subjectivity to memories that is really special IMO. What even is reality at the end of the day? We're all just one big collective story we tell ourselves.
3) It feels soulless. Enough said on this one, I think people know what I mean
I'm not OP, but I find the American threat more real and immediate than the more abstract Chinese and Russian threats.
From my perspective, the American President has threatened to annex my country, American businesses have repeatedly violated my trust, spyed on me and leaked my data, and American big tech is meddling in my country's politics. No other country has demonstrated such an ability and willingness to collect information about me and use it against me.
Given the US' NSA's long-standing violation of human rights at massive scale, and the proclivity of American society to be reasonable about kidnapping people, deemed unsavory, off the streets by jackboot thugs - and the fact that China builds roads, hospitals, ports, and communities around the world in nations considered 'inferior' by America's military junta/oligarch ruling class, while America bombs them into oblivion - I'm fine with the idea of eschewing American AI.
Its kind of necessary, I think, to resist this at the moment - at scale too, I might add.
If Americans want to fix this they still can - time is running out, however.
I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it.
Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.
I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back.
Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.
I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
I like the overall project and goal. I personally would like a way to ask questions to those that are living or have a template that I can use for filling in family history.
Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.
I like the idea, but I'm curious where to draw the boundary. If only I can read it, it can be my full recollection of everything. If I add my siblings, parents, cousins, etc, then some articles become painful or controversial (e.g. divorce, disease). Or I just ommit all the unhappy parts.
I agree, and now all that stuff is on Anthropic's servers.
It is stalker-ish to write up biographies like this about your relatives. It's one thing to write up the weddings and upbeat things like this, but not all families lives are just sunshine and rainbows.
How about that relative of the family who spent time in prison? Grandpa in war? Many old people don't naturally talk about some parts of their lives either because they suffered some injustice like (what as an Eastern European I can think of) their properties taken away by Nazis and Soviets, or they did something they aren't proud of. Are you going to oral history interview/interrogate them to fill in all the gaps? Do you tell them you're going to upload all they say to some servers where who knows who will have access to it?
There are also longlasting family feuds between sides of families, like how one son was tricked out of the inheritance maybe wrongly, maybe he was an ass to his parents. People holding grudges and explaining their life failure and derailment by wrongly or rightly blaming others.
Maybe your aunt is presenting a story that doesn't quite add up when you triangulate it from all OSINT and private sources. Maybe your cousin isn't the daughter of who you think she is. Is it your business?
Even if no such big thing factor in, a biography of a person will be very subjective. You can narrate the same life in many ways so they appear more or less successful or an asshole.
Its fine to keep these things as oral history and memory that fades.
I don't really care about what the regular people who were my great grandparents and their cousins did. Maybe if I could read all the drama, I'd end up hating a bunch of relatives. These things have a natural life cycle of forgetting. That's fine.
Again, it's all well if you live in a family where everyone is nice and everyone was successful and helpful. Otherwise it's a can of worms. Nerds can be a bit blind to this as they just want to play with the toys and treat it like some logic puzzle.
I actually spent a weekend last yr doing something similar. Went through a box of old photos with my dad and wrote things down before the stories were lost. Never thought to structure it as a wiki though. Way better than the Google doc I ended up with.
The bank transaction + location cross referencing to figure out which restaurants you went to is pretty cool. Would be great if this could pull in social media exports too. Point it at your X, IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.
Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.
This is awesome, dude. I love it. One of my personal points of friction is that I want almost all of my life to be public in whichever way it is, but I don't want to subject my friends to that without asking, and my life is pretty intertwined with that of my friends. I suppose I could add a new namespace and protect it, but for now I just keep my private notes in my Google Drive and my public notes on my blog. My blog etc. is in Mediawiki and I expressly like the interwiki linking form so it's seamless what's in the Wikimedia universe. The best part about the interwiki thing is that anything from the Wikimedia world can directly be hotlinked on your wiki too. That's really fun.
I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on. Great work, dude! I love it.
This is perfect example how to solve problem which should have been solved in our digital lives already decades ago. The issue is that our personal lives have been outsourced to social media platforms (looking at you Facebook...)
Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems like weird mishap.
This is really neat! Beyond being a personal encyclopedia, remember the Spotify documentary where each episode was someone else's POV? I'd love to document a trip with friends and everyone else to do the same and see/compare what everyone experienced!
That is actually pretty cool. I started doing that with the photo collections of family members, but only to add explanations to the metadata of the pictures. I might reconsider that approach now.
Great project! I can also see other use cases; investigative journalist or criminal investigators using this to create a detailed profile of persons (eg Epstein files), authors setting up detailed profiles of fictional characters for stories.
I have been thinking about the difference between 'consumption' and 'creation' style hobbies lately. Spending time drinking different coffee beans, or collecting sneakers, I would call 'consumptive'. Writing a software package, or knitting would be creative. I find that its useful to me to keep a balance between these in my life.
This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D
I would say thinking about the indended audience for your creative outlet is a good discipline - even if it's only one person. It often gives the project more of a focus which helps with motivation and makes it more enjoyable.
What a lovely project! What about using a personal, family wiki to collectively edit, update family related infos, would that work? Anyone attempted something like that?
I like my memories ephemeral and fragile. Reading AI-generated articles about my loved ones in the typical apathetic Wikipedia tone sounds like a deeply unnerving experience to me.
Yeah, that's my feeling too. It's an impressive and interesting project, but I don't want to do that with my life. It has had its ups and downs and some things I just don't want to dive back into like that (and don't want others to read either).
The genealogy part – researching my ancestors' life – feels more useful.
Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning yourself ?
I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I would love to read all about the events in the lives of my ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back generations.
Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing, where they spent their first holiday together…
That sounds like a really cool project and a really interesting way to preserve family history.
I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.
I am usually grossed out by AI when it fakes humanness, but not here, I think.
Steve Jobs saw the computer as a bicycle for the mind, a way to enable us to do more and be more. This is the metaphor against which I measure all technology.
I think that in this case, it helped someone make something deeply human by abstracting the tedium away. It did what a computer should do: aid a human with their task.
Technology has been feeling like a devil's bargain for a while now. This was a rare glimpse of how I used to see tech, and of why I was so excited about it.
I agree. I do admire the concept as a framing device to engage with your family history, but the "AI" part strikes me in a wrong way.
There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds better left forgotten, different framings, and all that emotional labor of trying to choose what and how you want to remember.
The use of LLMs for creating a shared view for some information isn't inherently morally dubious-processing and storing data is what computers have been doing for generations-except for the privacy implications, but letting this projection of a mega-corporation usurp the role of narrator for such a deeply personal story feels wrong on an instinctual level.
We are the last human AI free generation that lives on. It's your basic human instincts kicking in.
100% agree I just had exactly the same reaction. I love the idea and would definitely like to do the first part e.g. documenting key people (family members and other important relations etc), key events like weddings etc.
What a lovely resource, especially if it reflects stories and recollections given by the subjects themselves.
The idea of having AI do it all is really off-putting IMO. For a number of reasons:
1) You lose the curation. You'll inevitably see a bias towards documenting based on the quality and availability of the sources as opposed to the significance of the event. E.g. you might not have much info about some really special childhood event you or someone else remembers, but does that mean it shouldn't be documented? Conversely, I don't want a 10,000 word essay on (to quote one of the titles from the post) "The 3D printing saga" -- just because I happen to have hundreds of WhatsApp messages on the subject.
2) I don't want to fact check every detail. Personally, I think if grandad (RIP) would have told me he one surfed a 20ft wave of the coast of Filey, Yorkshire. I don't need a correction that it was unlikely to be that high. If these things are partly being done "in memoriam" then I think it's really important to preserve the experiences, stories and recollections if the people we're trying to remember. Dates etc are fine to validate and correct. But there's an element of subjectivity to memories that is really special IMO. What even is reality at the end of the day? We're all just one big collective story we tell ourselves.
3) It feels soulless. Enough said on this one, I think people know what I mean
The project itself is cool if you have access to a LLM API endpoint with good privacy (perhaps your own GPU server).
I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.
I guess PPQ.AI or OpenRouter.AI be of use to you here? Or maybe Apfel (Apple on-device AI) is powerful enough to do this?
https://confer.to/
He put many of the photographs right there in his blog post - he obviously does not see them as secrets
Which US smartphone operating system do you use?
A reputable company will follow the GDPR and not share my personal data without explicit opt-in consent. Dodgy LLMs are anybody's guess.
Would you give it to an LLM run by Chinese, Russian, or European corporation?
I'm not OP, but I find the American threat more real and immediate than the more abstract Chinese and Russian threats.
From my perspective, the American President has threatened to annex my country, American businesses have repeatedly violated my trust, spyed on me and leaked my data, and American big tech is meddling in my country's politics. No other country has demonstrated such an ability and willingness to collect information about me and use it against me.
Same.
Given the US' NSA's long-standing violation of human rights at massive scale, and the proclivity of American society to be reasonable about kidnapping people, deemed unsavory, off the streets by jackboot thugs - and the fact that China builds roads, hospitals, ports, and communities around the world in nations considered 'inferior' by America's military junta/oligarch ruling class, while America bombs them into oblivion - I'm fine with the idea of eschewing American AI.
Its kind of necessary, I think, to resist this at the moment - at scale too, I might add.
If Americans want to fix this they still can - time is running out, however.
I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it.
Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.
I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.
I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
Great example of a commonplace book. Jillian Hess has written extensively about this -- her books are well-researched and organized.
Oh I had no idea it was formalised to such a degree, we just thought we were doing an extreme form of scrapbooking haha.
Thanks for the resource!
I like the overall project and goal. I personally would like a way to ask questions to those that are living or have a template that I can use for filling in family history.
Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.
Thanks for sharing.
I like the idea, but I'm curious where to draw the boundary. If only I can read it, it can be my full recollection of everything. If I add my siblings, parents, cousins, etc, then some articles become painful or controversial (e.g. divorce, disease). Or I just ommit all the unhappy parts.
I agree, and now all that stuff is on Anthropic's servers.
It is stalker-ish to write up biographies like this about your relatives. It's one thing to write up the weddings and upbeat things like this, but not all families lives are just sunshine and rainbows.
How about that relative of the family who spent time in prison? Grandpa in war? Many old people don't naturally talk about some parts of their lives either because they suffered some injustice like (what as an Eastern European I can think of) their properties taken away by Nazis and Soviets, or they did something they aren't proud of. Are you going to oral history interview/interrogate them to fill in all the gaps? Do you tell them you're going to upload all they say to some servers where who knows who will have access to it?
There are also longlasting family feuds between sides of families, like how one son was tricked out of the inheritance maybe wrongly, maybe he was an ass to his parents. People holding grudges and explaining their life failure and derailment by wrongly or rightly blaming others.
Maybe your aunt is presenting a story that doesn't quite add up when you triangulate it from all OSINT and private sources. Maybe your cousin isn't the daughter of who you think she is. Is it your business?
Even if no such big thing factor in, a biography of a person will be very subjective. You can narrate the same life in many ways so they appear more or less successful or an asshole.
Its fine to keep these things as oral history and memory that fades.
I don't really care about what the regular people who were my great grandparents and their cousins did. Maybe if I could read all the drama, I'd end up hating a bunch of relatives. These things have a natural life cycle of forgetting. That's fine.
Again, it's all well if you live in a family where everyone is nice and everyone was successful and helpful. Otherwise it's a can of worms. Nerds can be a bit blind to this as they just want to play with the toys and treat it like some logic puzzle.
It's your wiki, you do as you please
I actually spent a weekend last yr doing something similar. Went through a box of old photos with my dad and wrote things down before the stories were lost. Never thought to structure it as a wiki though. Way better than the Google doc I ended up with.
The bank transaction + location cross referencing to figure out which restaurants you went to is pretty cool. Would be great if this could pull in social media exports too. Point it at your X, IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.
Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.
This is awesome, dude. I love it. One of my personal points of friction is that I want almost all of my life to be public in whichever way it is, but I don't want to subject my friends to that without asking, and my life is pretty intertwined with that of my friends. I suppose I could add a new namespace and protect it, but for now I just keep my private notes in my Google Drive and my public notes on my blog. My blog etc. is in Mediawiki and I expressly like the interwiki linking form so it's seamless what's in the Wikimedia universe. The best part about the interwiki thing is that anything from the Wikimedia world can directly be hotlinked on your wiki too. That's really fun.
I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on. Great work, dude! I love it.
You’re gonna really wish you recorded the voice of your grandma telling those tales.
Video >photo >audio >text
This is perfect example how to solve problem which should have been solved in our digital lives already decades ago. The issue is that our personal lives have been outsourced to social media platforms (looking at you Facebook...)
Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems like weird mishap.
What a lovely read, at least up until the AIfied bit.
Though from the title I didn't expect family history, I thought it was going to be more of a project like this: https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...
I've gone the polar opposite route and started printing photos that means things to me, and putting them into photo albums
This is really neat! Beyond being a personal encyclopedia, remember the Spotify documentary where each episode was someone else's POV? I'd love to document a trip with friends and everyone else to do the same and see/compare what everyone experienced!
That is actually pretty cool. I started doing that with the photo collections of family members, but only to add explanations to the metadata of the pictures. I might reconsider that approach now.
This is so inspiring, thank you for writing it. I’ve been wanting something to track my daughters life and this is exactly what I need!
Great project! I can also see other use cases; investigative journalist or criminal investigators using this to create a detailed profile of persons (eg Epstein files), authors setting up detailed profiles of fictional characters for stories.
This is beautiful, lovely, and inspirational. Really nice of you to open the source. Give me the inspiration to try it out from there.
I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you beat me to it. Love it!
So this is why RAM prices are through the roof. (JK, this is cool)
I have been thinking about the difference between 'consumption' and 'creation' style hobbies lately. Spending time drinking different coffee beans, or collecting sneakers, I would call 'consumptive'. Writing a software package, or knitting would be creative. I find that its useful to me to keep a balance between these in my life.
This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D
I would say thinking about the indended audience for your creative outlet is a good discipline - even if it's only one person. It often gives the project more of a focus which helps with motivation and makes it more enjoyable.
What a lovely project! What about using a personal, family wiki to collectively edit, update family related infos, would that work? Anyone attempted something like that?
I like my memories ephemeral and fragile. Reading AI-generated articles about my loved ones in the typical apathetic Wikipedia tone sounds like a deeply unnerving experience to me.
Yeah, that's my feeling too. It's an impressive and interesting project, but I don't want to do that with my life. It has had its ups and downs and some things I just don't want to dive back into like that (and don't want others to read either).
The genealogy part – researching my ancestors' life – feels more useful.
Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning yourself ?
I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I would love to read all about the events in the lives of my ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back generations.
Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing, where they spent their first holiday together…
[flagged]
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html