Avtar Singh found his birth mother after decades with help from ChatGPT

After decades of unanswered questions, Avtar Singh discovered the identity of his birth mother after a single ChatGPT query — and a short phone call that followed. The AI returned a name he had never heard before: Savinder Kaur Nagi, born in 1936 in Kisumu, Kenya. The lead pointed to an article and a photograph that finally connected pieces of a story his family had kept silent for years.

Avtar grew up believing the woman he called his mother was his biological parent, despite neighborhood rumours to the contrary. His father moved to Canada where he worked as a teacher; Avtar was raised in India by his grandparents and nicknamed "Titu" by his grandmother. Shortly after his ninth birthday he was flown to Canada in a three-piece suit, unable to speak English at first, and later adapted to life and school there.

At home, however, relations were distant: "She didn't have a bit of the warmth my grandmother had," he said. "She absolutely hated me." Years later, during a family visit, Avtar's grandmother told his wife that he was the son of his father's previous marriage. From his father he had only one name: Savinder. "I kept meeting a wall of silence," he recalled.

Concern deepened when prenatal tests for his wife Rozi showed anomalies and a geneticist asked for maternal family medical history. "I couldn't tell them anything about illnesses on my mother's side. That hit me straight in the heart. Then I said to myself: I have to do something." He searched for years without success; the name "Savinder" is common among Punjabi Sikhs, and he refused DNA testing for privacy reasons despite working as a chartered accountant.

From a Google dead end to an AI lead

On 8 May, while staying with his wife in the south of France after finishing cancer treatment, Avtar tried a different tack. "I thought: I've tried Google, everything else… why not try artificial intelligence?" he said. He fed ChatGPT every detail he had — the nickname, the lone name from his father, approximate ages and geographic hints — and the model returned a surprising result: Savinder Kaur Nagi, with a linked memorial-style piece written by a London jewellery designer, Niki Damu, commemorating her mother who had died in December 2024 at age 88.

The article included a photograph of a tailoring certificate issued in Darival in 1962 — two or three years after Avtar's birth and from the same town where he was born. The coincidence gave him new hope. That same morning he emailed Niki; the message arrived on the very day his mother would have turned 90. "I had a strong feeling that I knew. I can't explain it," Niki later told him.

Only two hours after entering his information into ChatGPT, Avtar was on the phone with Niki. She confirmed that her mother had been married and divorced in India and had a son. Then she asked the question he had waited a lifetime to hear: "Titu, is that you? Are you Titu, my mother's son?" Avtar and Rozi began to cry. "That's me," he answered. They talked for two hours until his phone battery died, and within days he was on a flight to London.

Neither Avtar nor Niki felt the need for a DNA test after the call. "There are a few billion people in this world. If someone can by chance call me Titu, I think I don't need any additional confirmation," he said. Despite the pivotal role AI played in reconnecting them, Avtar remains skeptical about its capabilities: "I know AI can make things up," he said, adding later that "At the moment AI is still just an overhyped search engine. It's software that recognizes patterns in sequences of symbols. There is no intelligence here."

The reunion clarified what he had long feared: his birth mother had not abandoned him out of indifference. In later conversations with family he learned that she had spent years calling for her child — "mera bacha" — and in the end she died having searched for him. "That's all I needed to hear. It's a wonderful feeling to know you were loved," Avtar said.

Photo: press material from the event