I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/im-begging-you-to-leave-your-ai-note

by cratermoon • 22 days ago

21 23 22 days ago

joanwestenberg.com

FromTheFirstIn4• 22 days ago

This is strictly a San Francisco tech problem. This isn’t happening to most people

cratermoon3• 22 days ago

That you know of.

FromTheFirstIn4• 22 days ago

You’re the poster- do you live in the bay?

blinkbat• 22 days ago

First thought was this sounds like a hyperlocal sf gripe

fragmede2• 21 days ago

You think people in Austin or Denver or Atlanta don't have the same Zoom app, with the same AI helper as the one they give to San Francisco people?

FromTheFirstIn4• 21 days ago

I think they have the same app, but they don’t use it like this. It seems like you’re confident this happens a lot- do you live in San Francisco?

Avicebron• 22 days ago

This feels like people several layers deep into devoid of all normal interactions.

We've had this technology (minus the auto summary) for years. People don't like being interrogated. It's crazy. Or maybe I'm crazy and someone needs to explain how all of this happened, it can't be all tiktok..

JSR_FDED• 22 days ago

Just wait till this is baked into glasses…

htrp• 22 days ago

I’ve adjusted to - and even embraced - the idea of AI note takers on every Zoom and Google Meet call, and they are indeed incredibly useful. Taking Granola’s output from a client meeting and dropping it into Poke to create all my tasks in ToDoist is a bloody useful workflow that shaves off a good deal of cognitive load.

What makes an in-person work meeting any different?

bix62• 22 days ago

AI note takers are so funny to me. Like what are you gonna do with all those notes? Go home after a long day, draw a nice bath, and flick through some shitty AI summaries?

And it’s AI so you literally can’t 100% trust it which is like half the reason I take notes by hand (to keep an honest record).

phil21• 22 days ago

Tune out of the useless meeting and do something useful with your time. Read the 5 bullet point summary afterwards.

If it gets things wrong, oh well. Not much of value was lost.

This describes the vast majority of meetings held in the corporate world.

rudolftheone• 21 days ago

That's not what the article is about. The author describes using AI Note takers in PRIVATE meetings :)

That's astonishing for me, first time I hear about such a practice

sbysb• 21 days ago

I mean most of these tools pair the notes/transcript with a video recording of the call. It can be super helpful to search the summaries to find the right recording, and then click the line in the transcript to re-watch the meeting.

For work, this is strictly better than not recording the meeting, as it allows for much faster searching, and it is very rarely wrong about the high level topics of a convo. I almost always go "General AI summary search" -> Transcript -> recording when trying to remember a specific item from a call.

That being said the parent article is spot on and I can't imagine someone bringing a recording to a conversation they aren't being paid to have.

bad_username2• 21 days ago

what are you gonna do with all those notes?

Dump them in Obsidian with an LLM agent bolted on. This note may never be consciously re-read, but it will become silent part of the context for conversations with the agent in the future. It is _ridiculous_ how useful this approach is.

That pertains to work meetings, though. I would never bring a recorder to a coffee shop.

bix62• 21 days ago

So useful how? Like what does this context actually end up doing for you?

cratermoon3• 21 days ago

Sounds about the same idea as taking a low-res picture of a document and saving it as a low-quality jpeg in folder full of low quality jpegs and then expecting those images to be useful.

ggm• 22 days ago

We had to issue a directive for an open attendance online board meeting I'm on. AI adjunct popped up unannounced, poses issues for formalisms like board minutes.

Aside from that I just think its rude. Ask permission not forgiveness. People talking to people is what a meeting is all about. If you need assistance there's a conversation to be had about why and on what terms.

LennyHenrysNuts• 22 days ago

At work, yeah, fine I guess. Outside of work? No way. And I don't mind being called a Luddite, I know what I am.

brianjking• 21 days ago

I can understand and appreciate the hesitation. I must admit I've simply adjusted to the idea that anywhere that I am, outside of my house, I assume someone is potentially recording or transcribing at a minimum audio.

I'm frankly far more upset by the lack of privacy due to poor security from credit reporting agencies than I am of these notetakers.

I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home

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