I took the notes in a meeting today¹. Sometimes I get complements on how I take notes. Today, though, I got an unusual one: In the middle of a discussion that I was capturing, someone paused and asked, "Is this an AI note-taking services? I don't think so because it's making spelling mistakes." I looked up from my keyboard a bit surprised, bearing a smile.

It made me think a bit about the differences between how humans and AIs take notes. One reason why she may have thought that I was an AI is that I've gotten really good at simultaneously transcribing and summarizing ideas – mostly, from my previous life as a high school debater. I think this is something that an AI note-taking service could reasonably learn to do, though I don't know of a service that does this today. Doing so lets me keep up to pace with the conversation as it's happening. Passing a reverse Turing Test² for note-taking is definitely a skill that one can learn with practice – for example, when you have take notes from a spreading³ opponent in a debate. (A related useful skill is being able to write notes like this while simultaneously thinking of things to say – a subject for another time.)

There's an aspect of this style of note-taking that I think would be non-trivial to replicate in an any AI-powered system – a feature that might seem totally trivial: That is, I know when and where to add the right indentations. The ability to organize threads hierarchically (and faithfully!) in a conversation should be quite difficult for an automated system. It requires decent context, not only of what is being said, but how it relates to concepts mentioned outside of the conversation. Maybe this would require a decent world model⁴ or reasoning capabilities; I'm not totally sure. The AI note-taking systems I've seen that approximate such features require human collaboration.

It reminds me of what a teacher once said on social media about the ChatGPT-generated homework of her students: it's writing mediocre ideas with perfect grammar and spelling. AI notes may provide clean transcriptions and auto-generated summaries, but they are mediocre at capturing the nuances of the conversation. After all, these details matter quite a bit for the goal of taking notes in the first place: they're a medium for memory, or maybe, a medium that lets me forget⁵.

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