Comment by bluGill

Comment by bluGill a day ago

18 replies

What is the problem?

Notes are valuable for several reasons.

I sometimes take notes myself just to keep myself from falling asleep in an otherwise boring meeting where I might need to know something shared (but probably not). It doesn't matter if nobody reads these as the purpose wasn't to be read.

I have often wished for notes from some past meeting because I know we had good reasons for our decisions but now when questioned I cannot remember them. Most meetings this doesn't happen, but if there were automatic notes that were easy to search years latter that would be good.

Of course at this point I must remind you that the above may be bad. If there is a record of meeting notes then courts can subpoena them. This means meetings with notes have to be at a higher level were people are not comfortably sharing what every it is they are thinking of - even if a bad idea is rejected the courts still see you as a jerk for coming up with the bad idea.

namaria a day ago

Accurate notes are valuable for several reasons.

Show me an LLM that can reliably produce 100% accurate notes. Alternatively, accept working in a company where some nonsense becomes future reference and subpoenable documentation.

  • lpapez a day ago

    Counterpoint: show me a human who can reliably produce 100% accurate notes.

    Seriously, I wish to hire this person.

    • namaria a day ago

      Seriously, do people around you not normally double check, proofread, review what they turn in as done work?

      Maybe I am just very fortunate, but people who are not capable of producing documents that are factually correct do not get to keep producing documents in the organizations I have worked with.

      I am not talking about typos, misspelling words, bad formatting. I am talking about factual content. Because LLMs can actually produce 100% correct text but they routinely mangle factual content in a way that I have never had the misfortune of finding in the work of my colleagues and teams around us.

      • aaronbaugher a day ago

        A friend of mine asked an AI for a summary of a pending Supreme Court case. It came back with the decision, majority arguments, dissent, the whole deal. Only problem was that the case hadn't happened yet. It had made up the whole thing, and admitted that when called on it.

        A human law clerk could make a mistake, like "Oh, I thought you said 'US v. Wilson,' not 'US v. Watson.'" But a human wouldn't just make up a case out of whole cloth, complete with pages of details.

        So it seems to me that AI mistakes will be unlike the human mistakes that we're accustomed to and good at spotting from eons of practice. That may make them harder to catch.

      • mangamadaiyan 20 hours ago

        What are the odds that the comment you're responding to was AI-generated?

        • bluGill 15 hours ago

          Good question. So far comments here mostly seem to be human generated, but I would be surprised if there were no AI generated ones. It is also possible to fool me. I'm going with - for now - the default that it was not AI.

    • Yizahi 18 hours ago

      You are mixing up notes and full blown transcript of the meeting. The latter is impossible to produce by the untrained humans. The former is relatively easy for a person paying attention, because it is usually 5 to 10 short lines per an hour long meeting, with action items or links. Also in a usual work meeting, a person taking notes has possibility to simply say "wait a minute, I will write this down" and this does happens in practice. Short notes made like that usually are accurate in the meaning, with maybe some minor typos not affecting accuracy.

  • bluGill a day ago

    If it is just for people in the meeting we don't need 100%, just close enough that we remember what was discussed.

    • namaria a day ago

      I really don't see the value of records that may be inaccurate as long as I can rely on my memory. Human memory is quite unreliable, the point of the record is the accuracy.

      • bluGill a day ago

        Written records are only accurate if they are carefully reviewed. Humans make mistakes all the time too. We just are better at correcting them, and if we review the record soon after the meeting there is a chance we remember well enough to make a correction.

        There is a reason meeting rules (ie Robert's rules of order) have the notes from the previous meeting read and then voted on to accept them - often changes are made before accepting them.

        • namaria a day ago

          Do just that. Enter an organization that has regular meetings and follows Robert's rules of order. Use an LLM to generate notes. Read the notes and vote on them. See how long the LLM remains in use.

  • ewhanley a day ago

    Meh, show me a human that can reliably produce 100% accurate notes. It seems that the baseline for AI should be human performance rather than perfection. There are very few perfect systems in existence, and humans definitely aren't one of them.

  • Tadpole9181 a day ago

    You show me human meeting minutes written by a PM that accurately reflect the engineer discussions first.

    • namaria a day ago

      Has it been your experience? That's unacceptable to me. From people or language models.