ChatGPT Helped a British Man Find His Sister in Two Hours After Decades Apart

Avtar spent his entire adult life trying to find out what happened to the mother who had given him up for care with another family right after his birth. Traditional channels - adoption archives, genealogy forums, conversations with relatives - had yielded no concrete answers for decades. The solution to the mystery came in under two hours, when, out of boredom, the man typed into ChatGPT what he knew about his origins.

The breakthrough came during a holiday. Avtar, having recently finished cancer treatment, was resting with his partner Rosie in southern France. With no particular plan, he opened a chat with ChatGPT and described what he had managed to piece together over the years about his own origins, expecting nothing more than another dead end.

A Lead in Two Hours

The model connected fragmentary pieces of information Avtar had known for years and pointed to a lead for a specific family in the UK. That is how it was established that his biological mother was named Savinder Kaur Nagi and was born in 1936 in Kisumu, Kenya, into a family from the Indian diaspora. Avtar emailed a possible relative that same day.

The message landed in the inbox of Nicci, Avtar's half-sister, on the exact day their mother would have celebrated her 90th birthday. Since childhood, she had heard a family story about a brother given up for adoption before she was born, but no one knew what had happened to him or where he lived.

It was crazy. I thought to myself: this is my mum's son, it has to be him - Nicci

Siblings closer than they knew

Nicci wrote back to Avtar almost immediately, and the two quickly moved their contact to WhatsApp and video calls. Both were surprised by how close they actually lived to each other - Nicci had assumed her brother lived in Canada, while Avtar, at the time they connected, was only a few hundred kilometers away from her, on holiday in France.

Once she realized how close they actually lived, Nicci asked Avtar outright why he didn't just fly over. Soon after, the siblings, who for most of their lives hadn't known of each other's existence, met for the first time.

A tool for connecting information

Avtar and Nicci's story made its way into Western media as an example of a chatbot use case different from writing text or code - searching and connecting scattered pieces of information that a person would otherwise spend years piecing together alone. ChatGPT had no access to any hidden database or adoption registry - it pulled together publicly available information in a way that Avtar himself had never managed to, despite years of trying.

Avtar stresses that turning to AI was the result of desperation after years of failed searches through traditional channels. Before opening the chat, he figured that since he had already tried everything else, he might as well give artificial intelligence a shot.

After making contact, the siblings turned to AI tools once more, this time for a less literal purpose. Avtar created a computer-generated image showing himself alongside cousins he had not yet met in person - a way to get used to his expanded family before their first real-life meeting.

For Nicci, the hardest part of the story remains the fact that their mother died before her son was found. The family is now going through old photographs together, trying to piece together a history that had gone unspoken at home for decades.

Avtar and Nicci's case illustrates the growing role of chatbots in genealogical and family searches - in Poland, similar tools are increasingly used by people looking for relatives separated by migration or adoption. Experts in family tracing, however, note that the results of such queries need to be verified against official registries and civil status records before they become the basis for life decisions or contact with previously unknown family.