Discussion summary
The discussion revolves around the use of AI note-takers, especially in healthcare, with opinions on privacy, consent, and productivity. Some emphasize privacy concerns, while others highlight convenience and efficiency.
What the discussion says
- Privacy advocates worry about data security and consent.
- Some users find AI note-taking helpful, especially in professional or healthcare settings.
- Others dismiss privacy concerns, emphasizing convenience and productivity.
- There is debate over the appropriateness of AI in casual versus professional contexts.
“Please review what affirmative consent is, especially in healthcare.”
“It's my convenience, your privacy prefs.”
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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- 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 - 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.
- > 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