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

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• Hacker News
• This is a reply to someone else's blog post (on a different site - odd concept, I kinda like it though). It may add a lot of context to read the original blog post https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/im-begging-you-to-leave-you... first, which is linked in the header but easy to miss, and then read this reply.
  by zamadatix
• OMG are people actually doing this for personal chats? That's psychotic.
  by advisedwang
• I agree with some points being made and disagree with others.

  Professionals should be using the best tools they're comfortable using. If that means your therapist can ask better questions and make better use of their time because they have a STT model running, I think that's great, counter to the author. Importantly though, in therapy especially, your comfort matters more than time efficiency, and can understand asking for it to be disabled.

  Catching up at a coffee shop does not need STT, I agree with OP...but are people really doing this? Sure, there's a few AI obsessed geeks doing it I'm sure, but is that really a main use-case of these devices?

  by dpoloncsak
• I’ve found no value in AI note takers. I’m not really sure what the value of a note taker is when you can simply transcribe the entire meeting and search within context.

  For me, the value of notes is writing down what’s important to me/the participants, including the actual process.

  by SkyPuncher
• I have mixed feelings on this (I have some relatives in the medical industry). On the one hand, having a professional scribe is absolutely a positive for the provider, provided they have been trained and are accustomed to that provider. They take away significant cognitive load from them, leaving them able to focus on the patient.

  With the proliferation of AI note taking, this advantage purports to have been democratized, but I'm not quite convinced. Since AI summaries are far from infallible, a mistake is bound to sneak in here and there (note that these aren't mere transcripts, but summaries split into sections). The provider may or may not go in and clean up your AI notes afterwards, any mistakes made by AI are effectively disowned in terms of responsibility, and admin will still pressure providers using these note takers as leverage to be able to see more patients than otherwise possible (admins want to see both lower costs and higher patients seen per day).

  When you refuse this type of service, you're demanding a higher bar for your notes, but it comes at the cost of a distracted provider (who has grown accustomed to AI note taking, and only has so many hands, so they have to go back to the keyboard every now and then after checking your body).

  In summary I think it comes down to how much you care about note quality versus care quality, which is likely different per person. I don't have any allergies, am not on any medications, and generally only go in for routine checkups, so in my case the notes are more or less a bureaucratic requirement that I'm happy to do away with cheaply. For others this may not be the case, and having quality notes may be critical to their care, in which case they should definitely refuse AI scribes.

  Of course, none of what I said goes into privacy, which is a significant matter. However, "iPad scribes" which are essentially third party contractors remotely taking care of the notes already exist, so those concerns which arise even without the use of AI are a bit of a different topic.

  by 1024bits
• AI only needs to be better than a human, which is also fallible.

  But I would only accept AI note taking if it was reconciled (in a timely manner) by a human listening to the audio recording and verifying accuracy. Without that, it's an unacceptable loss of accountability. Even with that, privacy concerns are abound with frontier models.

  STT local models offer different concerns, but generally are pretty good at transcribing in a quite environment.

  Capitalistic pressures reduce quality of health care far too often. Everything from artificially limiting how many doctors get degrees, to pushing doctors to see more people per day from such tech. The enshittification will continue until moral improves.

  by altruios
• I 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.

  by tristor
• I've had medical students in the room when doctors do all kinds of checks. I somehow didn't have any reservations about that either.
  by dumpHero2
• 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.
  by gdulli
• On doctors, I read a substack by a doctor who stopped using an AI notetaker after trying it for a year. They weren't his notes, and there was too much extraneous detail.

  Can't find it with a quick search, but the point of the essay was that making the notes by hand reinforced the essentials of each case in the doctor's mind, so they were there for the next appointment two weeks later.

  by tuatoru
• I've had medical students in the room when doctors do all kinds of checks. I somehow didn't have any reservations about that either.

  Medical students are covered by rafts of privacy laws that will end their careers if violated.

  The modern tech industry runs on privacy violation.

  The two are not comparable.

  by reaperducer
• While 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.

  by AntonyGarand
• These AI Note-Takers can also mangle the summaries. A few weeks ago I read anecdotes here about a doctor getting completely wrong information about a patient, and a manager getting upset because he was depending on a summary of something a client never said or agreed to, but the AI summary said he did. These things are downright dangerous.

  Now come the replies saying, "as if human note-takers never made mistakes!"

  by adamddev1
• Moreover, they capture all the smalltalk perfectly, but tend to plausibly mishear the parts that matter most - terminology, abbreviations, names of people. There's no mystery why this happens, of course, but the only transcript I trust is a transcript I personally checked by listening to the audio and fixing mistakes (doable at 1.75x speed, so not that bad). I catch outrageous mistakes sometimes, mistakes that completely change the meaning of what's being said (up to capturing the opposite of what's being said). So, all in all, even though modern speech2text models are really impressive, I am not sure the utility of _completely_ automated transcribers outweighs their dangers today.
  by bad_username
• Actually I think one of the main values of note taking isn't that you get notes, it is that engaging your brain to summarize points makes you understand and remember the points better, even if you throw your notes away right after.

  It is like writing: One of the main purposes of writing (for me and many others) is that it forces you to structure your thoughts. You could give that task to AI, get the resulting text, but your loss is the lack of clarity you could have gained from doing it yourself.

  by atoav
• In personal, light-hearted or even most 1 to 1 meetings I'd agree.

  But my note taker has been an incredibly helpful piece of technology in professional meetings where domain decisions had to be recorded, high-throughput arguments were exchanged, ideas brought up and todos just verbally agreed on.

  I always ask people, kindly and honestly with a lot of room for denial, for agreement to record meetings with them. No, I don't do it in meetings where I know personal topics could come up or be relevant. But those are more on the rare side. In most of my professional exchanges it hasn't posed a problem for anyone.

  by DeadlineDE
• Let's try the suggested advice and ask why five times.

  > Why do you even need an AI assistant here?

  To take notes on what we talked about.

  > Why do you want to do that?

  Because I want to retain the contents of this conversation, and I don't want to be distracted by note-taking. I want to be in the moment and also have a record of what we talked about for later.

  > Why do you want a record?

  Because I expect that what you're going to say is valuable enough to want to reference later. Perhaps you will give me the name of a cool podcast, or you'll give me very good, detailed advice. Perhaps you'll mention when your upcoming birthday is or a favorite brand of a product, and it'll be useful for gifting.

  > Why is that information valuable to you?

  Because I value you and your opinions.

  by CobrastanJorji
• "When have you arrived on this planet, and how did you come up with that name?"
  by customguy
• > 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.

  by saaaaaam
• Secretaries are compelled by the same privacy and disclosure laws as doctors - AI notetaking apps may or may not be (it'll take examination of the product on a case by case basis) and the public is, at this point, used to AI companies blatantly lying about privacy, confidentiality, training sources, reuse of conversations and pricing - the good faith is gone as a default and in a setting like a HCP that is a terrible place to start from.
  by munk-a
• my pet peeve is that these ai notetakers, like otter arrive to the web conf before their user.
  by fantasizr
• The difference being they were directly paid by the people involved and their notes weren't whisked off to outside companies with very loose privacy policies around your inputs.
  by rtkwe
• Secretaries weren't invited to one on ones and interviews generally. This was something for only the highest places employees and not say something an IC would be used to.

  Hence the engineers all going Wtf

  by getpokedagain
• 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".
  by rcost300
• And then the secretary shared the conversation with 260 ‘partners’ and added everything you said to an LLM training corpus…

  So, NO, this is not “what secretaries were”

  by catoc
• 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.
  by advisedwang
• >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.

  by john_strinlai