OMG are people actually doing this for personal chats? That's psychotic.
Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#22> Let's imagine for a second that the whole AI craze doesn't exist, but you still would want to real-time note-taker, what would you do? Indeed, you bring a literal third person to the table. That will just be sitting there, listening in on your conversation and writing everything down. That's what secretaries were, and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting for a long long time.
This article and the one it is responding to are explicitly talking about non-business meeting contexts. They are talking about personal conversations, medical appointments and much more casual business contexts like informal interviews. Places where there would never have been a secretary present.
medical appointments is a perfect use case for ai note takers. Imagine you have an elderly parent who lives hundreds of miles away. You can't always be present for their medical appointments, yet, the outcomes of those appointments are critical, and sometimes information is shared in a way that the elderly parent cannot be a trustworthy source for that info. What do you do?
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#23> Let's imagine for a second that the whole AI craze doesn't exist, but you still would want to real-time note-taker, what would you do? Indeed, you bring a literal third person to the table. That will just be sitting there, listening in on your conversation and writing everything down. That's what secretaries were, and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting for a long long time.
The issue is discretion - something that nearly all humans have, and no AI model has an ounce of. Any qualified human secretary would have had the discretion not to put "Joe was just speaking with his divorce attorney" into the notes for a meeting even if it got off-topic - and would not have to be explicitly instructed "please don't put this in the notes".
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#24I can understand, especially in a medical context, being bothered by AI notetaking specifically because it implies your private information being handed off to a third-party where you cannot control it, rather than that an AI tool is processing it. That said, it is common practice in business to take notes or record calls. I take notes either by hand or type-written in nearly every meeting that I'm in. I often record my meetings. When it's entirely within my company, we have an internal (e.g. not third-party) AI transcription tool that I enable. When meeting with external entities, I either write notes, record audio, or have a designated person with me to write notes.
Taking minutes/notes in a meeting and then being accountable to follow-up on any action items out of that meeting is just standard business process across industries and across the globe. That's not what the author is referring to with their therapist, that's a very different context, but in the context most people on HN find themselves in, having someone take notes is not only not a big deal, it /should/ happen.
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting i think the point being made is that you typically didn't bring your secretary with you, notepad and pen in hand, when you went down to the local coffee shop to catch up with someone.
Are AI-assistant-enriched coffee catch ups an actual thing that's happening or is OP inventing scenarios to be mad at?
Anecdata: I'm receiving them.
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting i think the point being made is that you typically didn't bring your secretary with you, notepad and pen in hand, when you went down to the local coffee shop to catch up with someone.
Are AI-assistant-enriched coffee catch ups an actual thing that's happening or is OP inventing scenarios to be mad at?
There could be a future, in which, during a date, each person granted their personal ai to take part in the conversation and also to exchange information among them, probably first to establish trustworthiness of the person in front of you.
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#27I've had medical students in the room when doctors do all kinds of checks. I somehow didn't have any reservations about that either.
I have usually permitted that when it comes up and sometimes declined it. But when I permitted it I didn't have to worry about them entering everything I say into a permanent history from which a random sentence could get used, datamined, hallucinated into something that could be used against me years later.
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#28> How fucking creepy is that?! How fucking awkward is that? And before you start talking with whoever you're catching up with, you ask "You don't mind, do you?" In living memory, I had a HUMAN notetaker in important meetings. After secretaries left the world went to hell and topic experts and engineers were expected to have social graces, everything got worse. We invented new religions like agile to make up for a goo…
Well, yes, but the article is not about those important meetings.
The examples there are literally meeting friends over coffee and attending a health-care professional.
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#29While I understand the dislike of the concept, I find myself liking my own universal notes of meetings I attend on a daily basis: It's a democratization of the concept of secretaries.
While not all meetings need action items and summaries, having high level notes or the full transcript available when you actually get to implementing a task, or having an agent go through the dozen meetings you had on a project to identify its evolution has made finding and keeping knowledge up-to-date much better in my own experience.
It helps account for bias towards the most recent candidate in interviewing as you can now compare all notes, helps recall some niche details that were said in passing for projects, and holds everyone accountable to what they said.
I still haven't found a perfect solution to actually storing and querying this knowledge, single meetings are easy but wiki-fying them is my end goal, but I'm very happy about the direction dictation, transcriptions and AI parsing of all this knowledge is going.
Re: Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
#30> Let's imagine for a second that the whole AI craze doesn't exist, but you still would want to real-time note-taker, what would you do? Indeed, you bring a literal third person to the table. That will just be sitting there, listening in on your conversation and writing everything down. That's what secretaries were, and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting for a long long time.
The secretary usually didn't wire all the info to a different company though.