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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

> Just leave your computer or note-taker device/app off. Or grab a napkin to write some notes on, that's not that hard. > > Not everything needs to be written down

Congratulations on your apparently very well-functioning brain with seemingly impeccable working memory. I really wasn't expecting this article to go from "I don't want this conversation to be recorded" to "why would anyone even want to take notes, it's not that hard" but I'll say it's certainly a way for this article to go.

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.

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.

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.

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?

OMG are people actually doing this for personal chats? That's psychotic.

I use it in my professional appointments. If someone asked me not to, I'd turn it off. It makes the flow of the appointment much better than if I try to write the notes as we go, and if I don't write then and there, something will probably be left out.

Edited to add, I don't see what problem the OP has, unless they're just uncomfortable saying no.

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.

I rarely have online meetings, but what annoyed me most last time I did was that I had multiple AI note taking services magnanimously send me multiple emails each telling me how if I signed up for their service they could share their meeting notes with me. It wasn't even that important of a meeting!

I love having a 3rd person in an interview. If they are taking notes, I can have a conversation with the candidate.

Well, had a meeting with a VC that literally brought his note taking 3rd person to the meeting, did not even say hello. Tbh, I still find it creepier than an AI transcriber.

did you use AI for your site because it ain't loading... so based on the title... I have no problem with people using them to help their memory, and if they kept it local, but I have a problem with monopolistic and exploitative companies with private data, that likely ends up in a govt db.

The most absurde thing is that nobody will ever read those notes, transcripts anyhow.

Knowing both doctors and nurses before AI scribes, actually hand writing notes isn’t usually done in front of the patient. They make quick notes so they keep up with the conversation and then when they need to do long form, they reference their scribbles but do the rest from memory at the END of the day.

For every one person that says they mind, it adds likely an additional margin of error AND time to their day. So I really disagree with making people’s lives harder. That’s why technology exists…

And more and more of these systems are on device models, not cloud compute. So I don’t see that argument either

Patient: "I want high quality care with good follow up."

Doctor jots down key bits on a paper chart.

Patient: "I want my records to go with me."

Doctor takes notes on computer.

Patient: "I want to sue my doctor if things go wrong."

Doctor takes copious notes on computer.

Patient: "I hate my doctor looking at the screen instead of me."

Doctor gets an AI scribe.

Patient: "I want my doctor to take the notes."

Doctor: sigh

I don't think the issue AI note-taking per se. It is whether a conversation can still be candid and confidential once everyone knows it may become permanent, searchable, and shareable. Big tech companies don't exactly have a clean record on privacy.

Just saying no sounds simple enough. But social pressure makes that very difficult.

The normalisation of constant recording really has me worried, everything is so monitored now. Privacy just keep get more and more eroded for the sake of minor convenient features and products. At what point do we start deciding these trade off are no longer worth it? And is it even too late to make that decision?

This is not OK

Archive fallback as the site seems to be timing out:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260707202807/https://firespher...

I think most people here miss the point. IF the AI Note taker would be only on device, it would be less creepy. But at moment everything goes to some companys (and so also more or less direct, to the government too).

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.

Yeah… NO.

Cluely is God-sent, I just want it in my glasses 24/7 and I’m set.

> 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 good old organized secretary.

So - no I won't apologize. My memory is that of a catfish. I see a moving object and i head towards it. Note takers are invaluable, human or not. And AI or NOT voice to text is NOT new.

Lastly, it's worked out to keep everyone honest. I work with clients, we have calls, they're long. I just had a client pull ME up in an old recording agreeing to do something after I said 'no thats out of scope'. So its nice to see some accountability.

I’m Begging you to keep your Luddite opinion with you . Just answer politely no and that’s it.

Why should I care about your opinion . It’s my convenience your privacy prefs.