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Add this to the "AI can be good, actually" pile of evidence: My grandfather served in the US Navy during WWII. He never saw combat, but still never talked about the war with his children or grandchildren.

In 1997, I spent a few months in Green River, Wyoming. Turns out that my small-town grandfather passed through there on his way to the west coast during his training. He started writing me letters about the 10 hours he spent in Green River, and then started writing about his entire Navy experience.

These letters and photos are the only record of this part of his life, and helped me understand how he became the person I knew 50 years later. He passed away three years after writing them, and when I shared the letters with my dad and uncle, they were moved by them as well.

In the last 30 years, I've misplaced those letters (although I'm positive my dad has them with the rest of his genealogy records), but I do have a PDF of the scanned letters. I asked Claude to take the PDF and create an interactive timeline. Here's the result: marktron.github.io/richard-alle...

I shared this with my family, and it sparked a day of discussion and remembrance. My siblings and their children had never seen the letters, so it was a great way for them to connect with their grandfather in a new way.