Using ChatGPT Plus to Create a Surname Word Cloud

I decided to take the plunge and subscribe to ChatGPT Plus for $20/month. It's a month to month subscription so I can cancel anytime if I'm not finding enough use for it. I genuinely enjoyed using the free version to create one of my recent bio sketches. This past week, I've been reading more articles and posts about using ChatGPT for genealogy and my curiosity is piqued.

With the Plus version, not only can you customize how ChatGPT interacts with you (I've told it I'd like responses to be centered around genealogy), but you can upload and analyze files and create AI images. Additionally, the Plus version gains access to ChatGPT 4, to search more up to date information, is faster and provides better results. It's still important to remember, AI is not infallible, please double check any important information before sharing. There are a few other benefits with speed during peak access periods and stability, but they weren't critical in solidifying my decision to give ChatGPT Plus a try. 

To test out how well it handles file analysis, I decided I'd like to create a surname word cloud. I always enjoy seeing these when others share them, and while I've tried some of the word cloud generators, I was just never really thrilled with them. ChatGPT made the process totally painless! For this test, I exported a Surname Report from Family Tree Maker 2019 (FTM). The resulting CSV contained 677 unique surnames, including the count for each. It also included columns for how many instances were male or female. I removed those extra columns and included only surnames and overall count in my file. The AI analyzed the file and responded "The data from your file is structured with two columns: "Surname" and "Count". I will use this information to create a word cloud where the size of each surname is proportional to its count. Let's proceed with creating the word cloud." It then displayed the image for me. The colors it used by default work well with my blog theme, so I didn't even need to ask it to tweak the image.

Needless to say, I was pretty impressed! So much, in fact, I'm going to include the surname cloud on my sidebar. Since it was SO easy to create, I won't hesitate to update it from time to time. This is a pretty simple example of how to use AI to analyze a file and provide useful output. I'll continue to post on how I'm using AI as a part of my blog and my research. (If you'd like to see a larger version of my surname cloud, just click on the image above).