Take messy notes and make them clear (jotting is the future of note taking)

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Recently read “The end of organizing” and got me thinking how we could make note-taking more efficient using AI.

In that spirit, here are a couple of things, I’ve tried with the AI assistant AVA (note I’m co-creator of the plugin).

From messy recipes to structure

Here you can see how I take a terribly formatted recipe and transform it with the Rewrite tool into something you could send to a friend.

From messy bullet points to a markdown table

Here is another example that creates a beautiful markdown table from completely disorganized bullet points.

What next

Now imagine a world where you take this one step further. Your notes could be automatically formatted. They would be easy to write, easy to find, and ready to send at a moment’s notice.

Would be curious to hear people’s thought on this.

Is anyone excited to see where this is going? Has anyone done other cool experiments with their own plugins in that direction?

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The examples are impressive, this is definitely going to get some use starting from 2023.

Somehow this doesn’t excite me, though. Organizing your notes is part of thinking, not just another cumbersome / repetitive task. I’m afraid that these tools will reduce humanity’s ability to reason, overall.

I’m pretty sure google maps significantly reduced the average person’s sense of direction (I certainly feel so for myself).

How do you think it will affect human reasoning ?

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That’s definitely a valid point. My more optimistic take (based mainly on observing my own behavior) is that people will tend to write more and in turn share more content.

I initially started using Roam (and later Obsidian), because it gave me the feeling of “you don’t need to care in which folder this ends up”. Bidirectional linking is a stepping stone towards: “write more, organize less”.

All these AI advances in organization and writing will not directly make you a better thinker, but they will shorten the feedback loop in your creative process.

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I used the plugin to parse YC website quickly

Rewrite command, parsing a web page, removing images:

Rewrite command:

Rewrite command:

Complete command:

PS: We’ll soon enable unlimited size rewrite :slight_smile:

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I was also searching for a similar solution to my Fleeting Notes problem. But then I realised, isn’t that the point?

I mean, the process of creating useful information and making a reliable source for future myself from that, starts with jotting and then going deeper by organising, adding, deleting and changing the things I wrote in a standard template, which I also developed. Shaping the thoughts in the end. This brings the great advantage of explaining a concept in your head, by your own words, so that you see at which points you lack. If AI gets into a point where it changes my jots, fleeting notes or my scratches on a medium and providing something out of it, how am I going to differentiate about things I don’t write myself and thins that I did?

AI has really a potential, enormous potential but using it in every aspect of life, at every tool we use does not benefit us anything in the long run, IMHO. AI should help me to find new connections inside my PKM, should suggest me additional information from reliable sources, should suggest me checking credibility of something I wrote but should leave the thinking and creating task to my own brain. Otherwise it will also be another text, note, drawing written/drawn by someone else.

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Fully agree on that with you @kenan . Looking into how AI could act as a “copilot” to note taking looks much more interesting to me than how it would do the thinking / creative work for us.

Because yes: organizing, summarizing, reformulating is part of thinking.

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(Off topic apologies) Ha! @srbd I love Google Maps lol. When I’m going anywhere new, I look it up first on Maps, work out the route in my head beforehand, so I have the journey in my head. Mostly I get there without any hiccups (a couple of times I’ve got lost, but part of the fun). I might make a couple of notes about highway numbers etc, but mostly I keep it in my head.

I notice that people who follow ‘in-car navigation voices’, learn to follow a set of instructions but are completely unaware of where they are spatially or geographically (maybe that’s what you meant?). Anyhow, maybe that just makes me ‘not average’ :sunglasses:

Guess like anything, depends how you use it

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A full automation would indeed [probably] be detrimental. But I think that the author is inflating the “end” of organization to make a point.

Using AI does not END organization, but allows you to store and retrieve information at a much lower cognitive cost.

Let’s bring back this gmaps analogy for an example. Giving up on finding out directions both has advantages and disadvantage. The question is it worth the price? Is it worth the price when you remember less because you’re so used to Google (note: this hasn’t been replicated), but you gain improved abstract understanding?

Coming back to AI and organization, will it pay off? This where it’s important to understand what is AI here. What are we talking about? Well, we’re talking about a mix between LLMs and Embeddings.

LLMs are, contrary to popular belief, extremely bad at generating new information, but extremely good at tasks just as normalizing, formatting, and extracting unstructured data.

Embeddings are exceptionally good at linking two types of information together.

I also believe there is value in the act of organizing. But, where does that value lie in going from a bullet list to a markdown table? Does it lie in your formatting of the text? What about the value of searching information in your own database? Does it lie in your remembering the exact synonym you used, the exact folder you put the information in?

Copilot’s success is definitely due to the ability to “suggest” information. (i prefer to call it staging). You still act as the curator.

AI is not a silver bullet, it’s another item in your tool belt that can be leveraged efficiently and works in certain context, but not others. But today, I believe one of the unresolved issues is how to integrate this seamlessly into people’s existing workflows.

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