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I am working on a book of my own and keep getting asked the same thing. How would you actually use AI to write a memoir of your parents? Not the philosophical question. The workflow. Here is how I would do it if I were starting from scratch tomorrow.

How I'd approach it

Capture the interviews first. The interviews are the gold. Before anything else, sit down with your parents (if they are still here) or with the people who knew them, and record. Phone in voice-memo mode is fine. Use Otter.ai to transcribe. The free tier gives you 300 minutes a month, which is roughly six one-hour conversations. It identifies speakers, timestamps everything, and the transcript is searchable. Pick Otter because it is the easiest one to recommend to anyone, not just researchers.

Build a knowledge base in NotebookLM. Letters, diaries, school reports, photos with captions on the back, the eulogy your aunt gave: scan all of it. Phone camera is fine for paper. Drop everything into a single NotebookLM notebook. NotebookLM lets you ask questions of your sources and gives citations back to the exact line. That last bit matters. You can ask, when did Dad first mention the fishing trip, and it will show you the letter. The free tier handles fifty sources per notebook, which is enough for one parent.

Draft in Claude. Claude tolerates long context better than ChatGPT and produces cleaner prose with less of the obvious AI cadence. Paste in three or four primary sources and a short brief about the person, then ask for a 1500-word chapter on a particular period. Most of what comes back will be wrong, and that is fine. You are looking for the shape, not a final draft.

Edit in ChatGPT and Claude. Run line-level tightening passes in ChatGPT, and use Claude when the structural problems are bigger. Either way, the voice in the book is yours, not the model's. Treat AI as research assistant, never author.

Hold the line on factual fidelity. Every claim on the page must trace back to a source you can point to. AI fabricates dates, names, and quotes confidently. NotebookLM is your seatbelt because it cites every answer. Claude and ChatGPT do not, so anything from those tools needs checking against the interviews and the documents.

A rough six-week order. Week one, collect the physical material: boxes, drawers, the cousins' attic. Week two, scan and upload, build the NotebookLM notebook. Week three, record three interviews and get them transcribed. Week four, outline the book in Claude, chapter by chapter. Week five, draft two chapters. Week six, stop, read what you have, and decide whether this is a book, an essay, or a private family document. Most people land on the third one and should not be disappointed by that.

What I'd avoid

Don't hand Claude the lot and ask for "a beautiful memoir of my mother in 30,000 words". You will get something that reads like the back of a sympathy card. The story belongs to you. AI's job is to surface, organise, and challenge. Choosing the words is yours.