What AI actually is (and how to avoid getting scammed)

Someone could charge you double for half the power. Here's how I spot it.

Part 1 of 3: AI for Family Historians Who Want to Finish

Welcome to all our new subscribers! It’s a great time to get started with AI, and here’s the start of a 3-part series on how to best use it. You can read all my past posts here.

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I had stacks of census records. Ship manifests. Vital records. Decades of research scattered across binders, hard drives, and browser tabs.

I kept thinking my genealogy problem was that I needed more records. One more subscription. One more weekend at the archives.

Turns out, my problem wasn’t lack of records. It was that I didn’t fully understand the ones I already had.

AI changed that for me. It took years to master how powerful AI actually is. And over the next three posts, I’m going to tell you everything.

What’s actually under the hood

LLMs: The engine behind AI chat tools

When people say “AI” right now, they usually mean a Large Language Model, or LLM. These are the engines that power tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

Here’s how I think about it: An LLM has been trained on enormous amounts of text, such as books, articles, historical documents, websites. It learned patterns in how humans write and think. When you type something, it predicts what helpful response would come next based on all those patterns.

It’s not searching the internet in real time (unless you ask it to). It’s not looking up your ancestors. It’s drawing on patterns from its training data to help you think through problems, understand context, and write clearly.

The big AI companies and their models

A few major companies have built these foundational models:

• OpenAI makes the GPT models. ChatGPT is how most people access them. When people say “AI,” 90% of the time they mean ChatGPT.

  

• Anthropic makes Claude (Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus). I use Claude constantly for my writing and research work.

  

• Google makes Gemini (formerly called Bard). It’s built into Google’s products. They also have the most advanced image generator called Nano Banana.

  

• xAI makes Grok, which is available through X (Twitter). It’s trained heavily on X data, which makes it less useful for historical and genealogical work in my experience.

Each company releases updated models every few months. A model that struggled with something in January might handle it beautifully by June. This field moves fast.

Here’s what matters for you

Different models have different strengths. Claude tends to be strong at nuanced writing and careful reasoning. ChatGPT is versatile and friendly to use. Gemini integrates well if you’re already in Google’s ecosystem.

I’ve tried them all. For my family history work, I mostly use Gemini and Claude. You don’t need to pick just one. I often use different tools for different tasks.

(Inside Chronicle Makers on Skool, I share exactly which tool I use for which genealogy task, and the specific prompts I use for everything from transcribing old handwriting to structuring a chronicle.)

The “AI” tools that aren’t what they seem

Wrapper apps: How people get scammed

Here’s something I wish someone had told me earlier: Not every app that says “AI” is giving you direct access to these powerful models.

Some apps are what’s called “wrappers.” They put a pretty interface on top of an LLM, but they limit what you can actually do. You can’t write your own prompts. You’re stuck with whatever pre-set questions they allow. And they often charge subscription fees for access you could get cheaper — or free — by going directly to the source.

I’ve seen family historians pay $20-30/month for genealogy “AI tools” that are just limited wrappers around ChatGPT, which you can use directly for free or $20/month for the premium version.

How I spot a wrapper

When I’m evaluating a new “AI” tool, I ask myself these questions:

• Can I write my own prompts, or am I stuck clicking pre-made buttons?

• Does it tell me which model it’s actually using?

• Is it charging me significantly more than going direct to ChatGPT or Claude?

If I can’t have an open conversation with the AI, if I can only use their pre-set templates, I’m not getting the full power of what these tools can do.

My recommendation

Start with the real tools: ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

They all have free tiers. Learn to prompt them yourself. Once you know how to have a real conversation with AI, you’ll immediately recognize when a “genealogy AI tool” is just giving you a limited, overpriced wrapper.

Why AI unlocks your research

The real reason you’re stuck

Most family historians I talk to have done incredible research. They’ve found records that took real skill to locate. But here’s what I’ve noticed in myself and in the researchers I work with: we collect records faster than we understand them.

That 1870 census you found? There’s a story hiding in the occupation column, the neighbors listed nearby, the fact that your ancestor couldn’t read but his children could. AI doesn’t find new records. It helps you finally see what’s in the ones you have.

What AI actually does for me

When I type something into ChatGPT or Claude, I’m not searching the internet. I’m having a conversation with a tool that’s absorbed more history books, immigration studies, and occupational guides than I ever could. And it can help me think through what I’m looking at.

Here’s how I use it: I’ll paste a transcription of a record and ask, “What does this tell us about this person’s life? What should I notice that I might be missing?”

The responses have opened my eyes to patterns I’d been staring at for years without seeing.

The librarian vs. thinking partner

Google Search is like walking into a library and asking, “Where are the books about Irish immigration?” You get pointed to a shelf.

AI is like sitting down with a historian friend who says, “Tell me what you’ve found so far — let’s figure out what it means together.”

That shift, from searching to understanding, is what finally let me stop endlessly collecting records and start actually writing my family’s stories.

Try this

Open one of the real AI tools: ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

Pick one record you’ve had for a while but never fully explored. Paste it in (or describe it) and ask:

“What does this record tell us about this person’s life that I might be overlooking?”

Notice how different that feels from searching.

If you want to see exactly how I use AI for every stage of family history work — from transcribing documents to drafting complete chronicles — check out this popular video of mine on YouTube:

Coming next

Now that you understand what AI is (and isn’t), on Wednesday we’ll talk about when to actually use it, and why sometimes it makes things up. Because yes, that happens, and I’ll show you exactly what it looks like.

Happy Chronicling!

—Denyse

P.S. Hope you enjoyed this special snow edition! If this post helped you unlock something new about your ancestors, please leave a comment and let me know. Would love to celebrate with you!