🇷🇴 Romanian citizenship

My paternal grandfather was Romanian. He had to flee his home in wartime to Soviet Moldova to be with my grandmother, and never returned. The move was so sudden that he didn’t get to say goodbye to his family, who never found out what happened to him.

Romanian law allows children and grandchildren of people who lost citizenship involuntarily to reclaim it. My family recently took a trip to explore our Romanian and Moldovan roots, and getting our heritage citizenship seems like a meaningful way to connect with our history. So my dad, sister, and I decided to go for it.

While we ended up hiring a citizenship attorney to guide the process, I wanted to see how far we could get on the consulate website with just AI.

Goal

Project: 🇷🇴 Romanian citizenship

Sector: 🌳 Family

Output: Romanian NYC consulate appointment

We wanted to obtain an official copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate from his small village Bivolari, as the originals were lost in wartime chaos. We thought we needed an initial meeting with the Romanian consulate in NYC. The online portal, econsulat.ro, doesn’t have English translation, and the Google Translate Chrome extension wasn’t working well.

Popular AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude have relatively recently gone multimodal, where images can be inputs in addition to text. The experiment was to see if inputting a series of screenshots, and desired outcome, could result in a multilingual AI set of eyes guiding us through the site.

Result

We started with an AI overview of what to expect in this process. It helped us understand the path ahead, and was well-versed enough in the Romanian process to understand that the eligibility of my sister and I was not dependent on my dad’s status. It also was appropriately conservative in advising that expert lawyer help would be needed.

We thought that we might be able to request the birth certificate through the site. So we started with a screenshot of the site, and stated our goal.

AI translated the page and identified which section to click on based on our goal. It then helped us choose the right option at the next several screens.

AI helped us understand the fine print that went with the selected path, and then guided us through more screens and dropdown selections.

As the process got more complex, AI helped us understand what was being asked for, and check on whether anything was missing.

At stages in the process, AI not only understood foreign documents we uploaded but also gave useful context. This helped us know what information we should expect to have based on our actual document collection, and which selections to make.

After a many more screens, AI helped us feel confident to submit, and explained next steps based on the confirmation email. The end result was a document containing our request for an official copy of my grandfather’s Romanian birth certificate, which AI helped translate.

We also tried in parallel with Claude, to test a different model plus because we ran into rate limit issues on ChatGPT. Claude was pretty good, but made more mistakes. Granted, this was before their Sonnet 3.5 model was released, so that might do better now.

It turned out that we did need to hire an attorney to help. The process is still too multistep, and nuanced knowledge of the process too undocumented. As AI agents with more robust planning, reasoning, and reflection are proven to be reliable, and as more knowledge is transferred from brains to files, it does seem like AI will play a larger helping role here.

But AI was still helpful in helping us feel confident in hiring an attorney. We don’t know anything about the Romanian legal system, or how to evaluate whether a potential attorney is legit before handing over sensitive documents and thousands of dollars. So we asked candidates to send us their Romanian lawyer ID card. AI was able to determine what the document was and that it had the elements of legitimacy (while not able to actually vouch specifically). Not a full solution, but a helpful step.

Assists

From the 💠♻️ BREC AI Assistance Loop, we used several forms of help.

• Research to help expand our context and knowledge base about an external process.
• Explain to focus our understanding on what we found on the site.
• Create to help focus our information into the text which needed to be inputted into the site.

Learning

This process is not perfect. We have not yet achieved our family’s end goal of obtaining Romanian Citizenship by Descent. We needed a lawyer to obtain my grandfather’s official birth certificate. AI did help me successfully navigate a site in another language through a number of complex interfaces and logical choices, all the way to the conclusion of the activity. This is impressive, and magical! But it also didn’t have the nuance or common sense to let me know that the activity was actually pointless.

Overall, I learned that the combination of multimodal input and multilingual understanding is quite good. This is a capability I’ll certainly use whenever I have to navigate a site not in English. I suspect that more sites will have automated AI translation built in, so it ultimately won’t even be necessary for the user to do anything.

It was also fine but slightly annoying to have the friction of needing to paste a screenshot into the chatbot at every step. It would be better to have an AI assistant with a live view of the screen, either through the browser or a desktop app. ChatGPT has demoed this capability for their app but it’s not yet broadly released. When capabilities like this are in our hands, it’ll be at first like having a smart friend looking over your shoulder to answer questions, and then later like riding shotgun while your industrious friend drives the process following your guidance.

Takeaway: When you need to navigate a site in a foreign language, AI can be your translator and process guide.

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Related: ♾️ 8P Strategy (Niche AI transformations), 🥽 Partylab.ai (Unforgettable human experiences), 🦁 Misha Leybovich (Builds big things). Thanks for reading!