alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
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.
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”
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
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".
my pet peeve is that these ai notetakers, like otter arrive to the web conf before their user.
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.
The secretary usually didn't wire all the info to a different company though.
>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.