[AlexandrB]

The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice.

A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.

[Karrot_Kream]

When I was a founding engineer at a(n ill-fated) startup, we used an AI product to transcribe and summarize enterprise sales calls. As a dev it was usually a waste of my time to attend most sales meetings, but it was highly illustrative to read the summaries after the fact. In fact many, many of the features we built were based on these action items.

If you're at the scale where you have corporate intranet, like Confluence, then yeah AI note summarizing will feel redundant because you probably have the headcount to transcribe important meetings (e.g. you have a large enough enterprise sales staff that part of their job description is to transcribe notes from meetings rather than a small staff stretched thin because you're on vanishing runway at a small startup.) Then the natural next question arises: do you really need that headcount?

[bee_rider]

I thought the point of having a meeting-notes person was so that at least one person would pay attention to details during the meeting.

[jethro_tell]

I thought it was so I could go back 1 year and say, 'I was against this from the beginning and I was quite vocal that if you do this, the result will be the exact mess you're asking me to clean up now.'

[bee_rider]

Ah, but a record for CYA and “told you so”, that’s pure cynicism. “At least one person paying attention” at least we can pretend the intent was to pair some potential usefulness with our cynicism.

[gus_massa]

Also, ensure that if the final decition was to paint the the bike shed green, everyone agree it was the final decitions. (In long discusions, sometimes people misunderstand which was the final decition.)

[soco]

If they misunderstood they will still disagree so the meeting notes will trigger another mail chain and, you guessed right, another meeting.

[bluGill]

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]

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]

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

Seriously, I wish to hire this person.

[namaria]

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 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.

[bluGill]

I think it is more like the clerk would say "There never was a US vs Wilson" (well there probably was given how common that name is, but work with me). The AI doesn't have a concept of maybe I misunderstood the question. AI would likely give you a good summary if the case happened, but if it didn't it makes up a case.

[mangamadaiyan]

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

[bluGill]

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]

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.

[Tadpole9181]

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

[namaria]

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

[bluGill]

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

[namaria]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[falcor84]

I agree, and my vision of this is that instead of notes, the meeting minutes would be catalogued into a vector store, indexed by all relevant metadata. And then instead of pre-generated notes, you'll get what you want on the fly, with the LLM being the equivalent of chatting with that coworker who's been working there forever and has context on everything.

[Yizahi]

You can probably buy another neural net SAAS subscription to summarize the summaries for you :)