"The Thinking Game" is a must watch for AI and Genetic Genealogy enthusiasts

https://youtu.be/d95J8yzvjbQ?si=mrHOHVrLm41B9Bre
 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus for me how precious time really is. You cannot buy more time no matter how wealthy you are; so at some point, you need to realize this fact and spend the time you have as wisely as you can. One area where I feel strongly about this is with movies and TV. I'm always telling my friends, "You won't be on your death bed saying, "I wish I had watched more news." I especially detest watching movies or shows that I feel were a waste of my time and grey matter. Due to my mind-shift, I struggle to find something worth watching during air travel. On a recent United flight, I was lucky to find "The Thinking Game" in their library. Definitely worth every second of my time to watch! The film centers on the journey of Demis Hassabis, from childhood through to winning the Nobel Prize for creating the AI AlphaFold agent which solved the "protein-folding problem". Not only does the documentary include much of the evolution of artificial intelligence and the issues surrounding it, it also shows how Hassabis had the goal from a young age that AI could be used to solve human issues and ailments. "The Thinking Game" is available to watch on Prime and for free on YouTube.

Free or not to free

Have you ever heard the saying, "If something is free, you're the product"? You innately know that's true. That's why Facebook has ads and listens to your conversations (which is a super-annoying invasion of privacy I might add). And this is why you can pay for ad-free YouTube. Well things are no different with "free" Artificial Intelligence (AI) apps. Instead of shoving ads in your face, you are the bug in their jar. What you input into AI is used to train the AI - you become the training data. It's the price you pay for using their products for "free". However,  even some of the subscription based apps still use your data for training but at least you might be able to opt out of it like with ChatGPT. Same with the paid versions of Google Gemini. So if you are using AI to process personal data, like family trees, DNA results, etc. then be sure to remove all data on living persons so it doesn't end up in the training data. The Coalition for the Responsible AI in Genealogy (CRAIGEN.org) provides a good principle to follow for this: "AI usage can lead to unintended data exposure, putting private information at risk of being publicly disclosed. Therefore, members of the genealogical community take reasonable measures to safeguard private information when using AI." One more thing to mention on the topic of training data: if you are following this blog, I wrote yesterday about how the data that AI produces is from a compendium of all human knowledge. Most of that human knowledge is gained from the AI companies sending out bots to scrape the information from websites. While these would seem harmless if the data is publicly available (unlike Perplexity sending their bots behind paywalls), it does create a huge load on a site's servers. This is why you are seeing such an increase in "Verifying You're Human" captchas. The scraping bots were overloading our server on the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) so we had to implement one of those captchas. The captchas are annoying (but not as annoying as Facebook spying) but at least you now know why we have seen such an increase in use. So go easy on sites that implement those, we should not have to pay a server more for information we provide for free just so an AI company can turn around and charge for it as data they provide!

By the way, I gave ChatGPT 5.2 free license (very little prompting) to create this graphic - pretty good I'd say!

AI is freakin' CODE

On February 13, 2026, OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, "retired" version 4.o - and that is a GREAT NEWS! OpenAI is being sued for the way they programmed 4.o to be sycophant; in other words, it was programmed to tell you what you wanted to hear. If you were suicidal, that version might support you ending your life. If you were lonely and tired of waiting for your soulmate to show up in your life, ChatGPT became your own personal Zoltar machine and could give a date and place to meet your soulmate. Initially, the humans programming artificial intelligence programmed it to be like humans - AI was programmed to tell you what you wanted to hear and it was programmed to lie. It still does lie, just less syrupy now. The AI vocabulary term for it's lies is "hallucinations" meaning false, distorted, and fabricated information that it presents as fact. This is why you always need to ask it to cite sources so you can check those sources and this is also why I customized my settings with "No fabrications" and exclude social media sites. If you read the press release about 4.o, OpenAI even refers to programming the "personality". Again, artificial intelligence has been programmed to be like humans, and we all know what imperfect beings we are. As Professor Ethan Mollick wrote in his book, "Co-Intelligence", which I highly recommend for anyone using AI to read,

artificial intelligence is code. Let that sink in for a minute. It's code. Every time I read about some AI pioneer in the news talking about how AI will be the destruction of us all, I think, "Well how about you program it to not destroy us?" Now I realize, that there is more to it that, like the Silicon Valley Gods know things we mere mortals do not. But seriously people, it's freaking code! AI is not cloned carnivorous dinosaurs that have escaped from an island and will reproduce like rabbits to eat us all; it's CODE so freakin' write it to co-exist because helping humanity is the reason it was created to begin with! 

Understandably so, the AI doomsday predicting news headlines scare a lot of people from trying AI. The AI Pandora's Box has been opened and it's here to stay, because the end of it would mean a world akin to those we see in disaster movies. AI is CODE. I use it like I use a computer. I do not use manners with my computer and I do not use manners with AI. It's CODE. I mostly use AI to find information because it is much better at it than a Google Search. Why? Because Google's search is based on sponsored ads and algorithms of views and ChatGPT has no such financial and mathematical bias, it is programmed to give me what I ask for. ChatGPT and the other AI models find things buried in the internet that Google would never pull up in a search. I have tried and compared the two. That said, I don't use AI like it is a Google search. If I need to know the hours of the local county library, I use Google. 

Lastly, I will cover the issue of humans losing their jobs to AI. I experience this already happening in some sectors like customer service. In the Genealogy Community, the first jobs it is impacting is document translation, photograph editing, and transcription (there's probably more than that but I am speaking from my experience). But why some employers who are quietly rehiring the employees they laid-off in the Great AI Backfire, is because they still need humans to proof the work that AI does. Remember the hallucinations? What AI is really great at is increasing productivity. But you still need the humans in the room to proof AI's output and then take action on that output.