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Comment by saaaaaam | Hacker News Reader

> 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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>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.

Are AI-assistant-enriched coffee catch ups an actual thing that's happening or is OP inventing scenarios to be mad at?

i have no idea! i have never encountered it. the original blog comes across as a bit larp-y to me, but on the other hand, some weird stuff happens in some circles and/or cities.

Anecdata: I'm receiving them.

There could be a future, in which, during a date, each person granted their personal ai to take part in the conversation and also to exchange information among them, probably first to establish trustworthiness of the person in front of you.

So… it’s essentially computers entering into relationships on behalf of their human subscribers thus acting as a personality shim between each one of the people ensuring compatibility which will abruptly expire upon termination of the subscription…

Žižek gets real!

(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7xYO-VMZUGo; here he shares his opinion on what an ideal date would look like, which I'd rather not spoil)

With remote work the equivalent e.g. a quick social chat on zoom or 1-1 meeting is. We should be picky as to which ones we bring a not taker too.

As for a real coffee shop? There is a YC working on a bolt on recorder for your phone so yes. And black mirror is starting to look like a documentary at this point.

I've had now-ex friends send me unsolicited ai-slop catch-up messages summarizing their life "since we last spoke".

You should reply and see if you get an agent reply.

On a date, when the clothes come off I press record (with consent) on my Ai assistant.

The after action report is enlightening.

Are you a guy or a girl?

Maybe?

> The after action report

Ah, I see you studied on Beta Colony, where they have a very logical approach to such things. /vorkosigan-saga-reference

Found Dennis Reynolds' HN account.

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.

medical appointments is a perfect use case for ai note takers. Imagine you have an elderly parent who lives hundreds of miles away. You can't always be present for their medical appointments, yet, the outcomes of those appointments are critical, and sometimes information is shared in a way that the elderly parent cannot be a trustworthy source for that info. What do you do?

You make them get the results and guidance in writing, and if they forgot to get it in writing, you have them contact the provider and get it in writing. You don't send a tape recorder.

Record the audio, transcribe it later. Your AI note taker will mangle some of the details in a subtle but wrong way. Or not, who knows? But if you have ever transcribed anything with whisper, it is both amazing how well it works, and how it can go completely off the rails if there is a prolonged pause or noise. It will just make up words, fill the gaps. I am assuming the transcription process for an AI note taker will not use anything fundamentally different than Whisper

Except they straight up drop important clinical information. My partner has to go over it with a fine toothed comb and it saves her zero time.

This is my experience with it refining meeting notes. Important context is washed out because the ai converts stuff to super generic terms instead

not my experience with a tuned prompt - using fathom

Does /anyone/ take notes in a personal context? I don't take notes when I catch up with friends, but neither does anyone else. It's a complete non-issue.

To a physio therapist (the article example) that is a business meeting. That's what's strange here. That person isn't there because their you're friend: they're getting paid to be there, which makes it a business meeting, which makes a secretary, human or AI, appropriate.

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”

Right, the secretary would just gossip about it with their friends and partners behind your back.

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".

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 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.

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.

> Secretaries are compelled by the same privacy and disclosure laws as doctors

What HIPAA-like law is there for secretaries?

Anyone handling PII needs to be trained in HIPAA compliance and authorized in the same manner as the doctor themselves. There is no explicitly separate HIPAA like law though if your handling of the information is limited to a particular subset of the information (e.g. knowing that a patient has an appointment with a renal specialist and knowing their address information but not knowing the topic of the appointment) then there may be a relaxation of the requirements - but patients are also blabby so usually they're treated like anyone else.

When it comes to AI note-taking or other AI services that interact with PII the exact same requirements and data handling standards need to be adhered to as if the tool was an employee with proper certified training (or, in the case of a tool, review and certification) and appropriate contracts and disclosures.

I can't really provide a more specific answer because the topic is so broad and while I'm familiar with the process from one end I am not an expert on the process in general.

> Anyone handling PII needs to be trained in HIPAA compliance

Anyone working at a covered entity needs HIPAA training. A random secretary working for some other random company unrelated to healthcare and isn't potentially a covered entity doesn't need it.

I originally took your comment as secretaries in general, but re-reading makes it more clear to me you're specifically talking about secretaries in a healthcare setting. In which case yes, they would be bound to the same HIPAA rules I agree.

Sorry about that confusion! Yeah, I was going off the example in the linked article which is specifically for note-taking during a physio appointment.

The secretary usually didn't wire all the info to a different company though.

she was probably remembering everything and using it as strategic office gossip anyway, same idea

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