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.
If you build this encyclopedia as a purely robotic collector of facts that nobody reads, it’s probably more dystopian horror.
If you build it as a fun inner loop that reconnects you with people and memories and makes you more human, then it’s great.
We should endeavor to craft experiences that do the latter; right now we are back in the hacker days when small teams can build big new ideas, and big tech hasn’t taken over.
It'd be better if we all turned this tech off and went to be with other people.
This is basically how social media was when you needed a computer to go online. You’d sit and sift through your feeds and there’d be message chains you respond to. You’re not really doing anything else while you’re doing that and you’re putting it out of mind once you step away. When Twitter first started getting big it was sort of a joke that people are talking to you while on the toilet. The idea that you were only ever half engaged with anything you’re doing was remarkable enough to be worth pointing out instead of taken for granted.
It’s just a lot more focused and intentional when you’re dedicating time and headspace to the task instead of “microdosing” on connection via a dopamine lottery. Even if you took away the ads and the interpolation of creator-content crowding out the connections with people you actually know, I think designing for an infinite scroll just inherently makes the thing less human-centered. It sets it up so you’re interacting with these atomized bits of ‘content’ rather than people.
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.
It is a nice idea, and I can imagine how it may serve to strengthen the family's social cohesion, in a time where everyone is busy doing the rat race. Though I'd not use it as "encyclopedia", a cold-hearted fact recorder, more like more a social-focused "Our Family Diaries" and would be much better served by family members writing down their own experiences.
Because without AI it probably wouldn’t exist.
I understand the bittersweet feeling because I did all the editorial work for the wedding page and the first few others and I did feel like a historian trying to connect the dots after stumbling into some primary/secondary materials and spending a couple months doing all the editorial work
after I began experimenting with agents, it sped up my process that otherwise would've taken many more months for every page given that the kinds of data sources also increased over time
I did still spend significant amounts of time like a wikipedia contributor would deciding on what to keep, enhance or delete from the page based on my own personal preferences and what I was comfortable with seeing on the page
the dystopic feeling is also fair and unsettling, I think this ironically also made me realize how important safeguarding my personal data is, we leave digital trails of ourselves everywhere so a powerful agent can string them together to create a story of who you are
That's the use-case I enjoy with AI. Let it do the heavy-lifting, I'll enjoy the rest.
AI here is not a tool, it's the author, or at the very least a co-author that greatly influences the human author. It selects what's important and then writes the narrative. It has its own biases. The narrative isn't based on what's personally important to the human creator, but rather the availability of data, those sources that are digitized. And then in turn the output shapes the human author's own perspective, changing even what the human will write on their own.
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
If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.
Similar with this, when you're hand curating old photographs and personally interviewing relatives, you're learning something. You're deepening relationships and your own personal understanding of these people you love, spending time reflecting on your own life. But when you send an LLM at it and it produces the volume of real Wikipedia, now an automated process is producing more text than you can ever possibly read if all you did for the rest of your life is read.