That's what secretaries were, and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting for a long long time.
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.
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.
(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)
So, NO, this is not “what secretaries were”
Hence the engineers all going Wtf
What HIPAA-like law is there for secretaries?
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 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.
This post is incoherent. It begins with an anecdote about AI in a medical context, but later acts as if the whole post is about AI in casual conversation (as it is in the (better-written) post they are responding to). Those are very different contexts with very different considerations! But also both the original post and reply are premised on the idea that saying "actually I'd rather not" is super awkward and makes you "sound like a paranoid Luddite". That is catastrophizing, as evidenced by the anecdote in which the author says "yes I mind" and it is totally fine. Look, different people have different social norms, and while it is good to have boundaries and voice them, it is also good to try to understand where they're coming from, and not respond with "of course I fucking mind, how dare you!" To people like me, an AI transcription of a convo is simply not the same as a third person in the conversation. If you introspect for a bit, you can probably see how I could think the way I do. I certainly understand how someone can think AI is like a third person! If you take the time to understand where people are coming from, it will make it easier for you to politely establish your boundaries and also lower your blood pressure in general.
> Why do you even need an AI assistant here?
To take notes on what we talked about.
> Why do you want to do that?
Because I want to retain the contents of this conversation, and I don't want to be distracted by note-taking. I want to be in the moment and also have a record of what we talked about for later.
> Why do you want a record?
Because I expect that what you're going to say is valuable enough to want to reference later. Perhaps you will give me the name of a cool podcast, or you'll give me very good, detailed advice. Perhaps you'll mention when your upcoming birthday is or a favorite brand of a product, and it'll be useful for gifting.
> Why is that information valuable to you?
Because I value you and your opinions.
But my note taker has been an incredibly helpful piece of technology in professional meetings where domain decisions had to be recorded, high-throughput arguments were exchanged, ideas brought up and todos just verbally agreed on.
I always ask people, kindly and honestly with a lot of room for denial, for agreement to record meetings with them. No, I don't do it in meetings where I know personal topics could come up or be relevant. But those are more on the rare side. In most of my professional exchanges it hasn't posed a problem for anyone.
Now come the replies saying, "as if human note-takers never made mistakes!"
It is like writing: One of the main purposes of writing (for me and many others) is that it forces you to structure your thoughts. You could give that task to AI, get the resulting text, but your loss is the lack of clarity you could have gained from doing it yourself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20268974 (2019, 238 comments)
However, note taking in a business sense is usually different than note taking in an academic sense. Business meetings are more often used to make decisions, unlike academics where lectures are intended to disseminate information.
For me, the value of notes is writing down what’s important to me/the participants, including the actual process.
While not all meetings need action items and summaries, having high level notes or the full transcript available when you actually get to implementing a task, or having an agent go through the dozen meetings you had on a project to identify its evolution has made finding and keeping knowledge up-to-date much better in my own experience.
It helps account for bias towards the most recent candidate in interviewing as you can now compare all notes, helps recall some niche details that were said in passing for projects, and holds everyone accountable to what they said.
I still haven't found a perfect solution to actually storing and querying this knowledge, single meetings are easy but wiki-fying them is my end goal, but I'm very happy about the direction dictation, transcriptions and AI parsing of all this knowledge is going.
Medical students are covered by rafts of privacy laws that will end their careers if violated.
The modern tech industry runs on privacy violation.
The two are not comparable.
Can't find it with a quick search, but the point of the essay was that making the notes by hand reinforced the essentials of each case in the doctor's mind, so they were there for the next appointment two weeks later.
With the proliferation of AI note taking, this advantage purports to have been democratized, but I'm not quite convinced. Since AI summaries are far from infallible, a mistake is bound to sneak in here and there (note that these aren't mere transcripts, but summaries split into sections). The provider may or may not go in and clean up your AI notes afterwards, any mistakes made by AI are effectively disowned in terms of responsibility, and admin will still pressure providers using these note takers as leverage to be able to see more patients than otherwise possible (admins want to see both lower costs and higher patients seen per day).
When you refuse this type of service, you're demanding a higher bar for your notes, but it comes at the cost of a distracted provider (who has grown accustomed to AI note taking, and only has so many hands, so they have to go back to the keyboard every now and then after checking your body).
In summary I think it comes down to how much you care about note quality versus care quality, which is likely different per person. I don't have any allergies, am not on any medications, and generally only go in for routine checkups, so in my case the notes are more or less a bureaucratic requirement that I'm happy to do away with cheaply. For others this may not be the case, and having quality notes may be critical to their care, in which case they should definitely refuse AI scribes.
Of course, none of what I said goes into privacy, which is a significant matter. However, "iPad scribes" which are essentially third party contractors remotely taking care of the notes already exist, so those concerns which arise even without the use of AI are a bit of a different topic.
But I would only accept AI note taking if it was reconciled (in a timely manner) by a human listening to the audio recording and verifying accuracy. Without that, it's an unacceptable loss of accountability. Even with that, privacy concerns are abound with frontier models.
STT local models offer different concerns, but generally are pretty good at transcribing in a quite environment.
Capitalistic pressures reduce quality of health care far too often. Everything from artificially limiting how many doctors get degrees, to pushing doctors to see more people per day from such tech. The enshittification will continue until moral improves.
Congratulations on your apparently very well-functioning brain with seemingly impeccable working memory. I really wasn't expecting this article to go from "I don't want this conversation to be recorded" to "why would anyone even want to take notes, it's not that hard" but I'll say it's certainly a way for this article to go.
Professionals should be using the best tools they're comfortable using. If that means your therapist can ask better questions and make better use of their time because they have a STT model running, I think that's great, counter to the author. Importantly though, in therapy especially, your comfort matters more than time efficiency, and can understand asking for it to be disabled.
Catching up at a coffee shop does not need STT, I agree with OP...but are people really doing this? Sure, there's a few AI obsessed geeks doing it I'm sure, but is that really a main use-case of these devices?
Edited to add, I don't see what problem the OP has, unless they're just uncomfortable saying no.
OP's problem seems to be that there is an assumption that they are okay with being recorded, which is their very first argument in this article. What's more, with the attitude you apparently have, we should expect more incidents such as this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1um3anj/...
This whole "it makes the flow of the appointment much better" argument is one that I assume you'll use to justify this default position of recording others without clear consent. Clear consent, mind you, is receiving a "yes".. as opposed to saying "they didn't say no".
Consent doesn't happen just because someone didn't say no.
> If someone asked me not to, I'd turn it off
Case in point.. you've admitted to recording before receiving affirmative consent.
For every one person that says they mind, it adds likely an additional margin of error AND time to their day. So I really disagree with making people’s lives harder. That’s why technology exists…
And more and more of these systems are on device models, not cloud compute. So I don’t see that argument either
Doctor jots down key bits on a paper chart.
Patient: "I want my records to go with me."
Doctor takes notes on computer.
Patient: "I want to sue my doctor if things go wrong."
Doctor takes copious notes on computer.
Patient: "I hate my doctor looking at the screen instead of me."
Doctor gets an AI scribe.
Patient: "I want my doctor to take the notes."
Doctor: sigh
Just saying no sounds simple enough. But social pressure makes that very difficult.
The normalisation of constant recording really has me worried, everything is so monitored now. Privacy just keep get more and more eroded for the sake of minor convenient features and products. At what point do we start deciding these trade off are no longer worth it? And is it even too late to make that decision?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260707202807/https://firespher...
Taking minutes/notes in a meeting and then being accountable to follow-up on any action items out of that meeting is just standard business process across industries and across the globe. That's not what the author is referring to with their therapist, that's a very different context, but in the context most people on HN find themselves in, having someone take notes is not only not a big deal, it /should/ happen.
In living memory, I had a HUMAN notetaker in important meetings. After secretaries left the world went to hell and topic experts and engineers were expected to have social graces, everything got worse. We invented new religions like agile to make up for a good old organized secretary.
So - no I won't apologize. My memory is that of a catfish. I see a moving object and i head towards it. Note takers are invaluable, human or not. And AI or NOT voice to text is NOT new.
Lastly, it's worked out to keep everyone honest. I work with clients, we have calls, they're long. I just had a client pull ME up in an old recording agreeing to do something after I said 'no thats out of scope'. So its nice to see some accountability.
Once upon a time the notes may have been recorded by a staff member of the doctor's office or by the doctor themselves (usually after the meeting). Budgetary constraints push HCPs towards cutting staff and those rolls are being replaced by AI and that is not okay.
Staff, Nurses, Doctors are all under the clear guidance of HIPAA and understand their responsibility towards patient privacy - it isn't a perfect system and there are notable disclosures and violations that have happened in the past but once third party systems are involved - especially non-deterministic third party systems - then the client's understanding of privacy may be severely compromised.
I love voice to speech and meeting summarization for thinking sessions with coworkers where maybe someone is motivated to take notes (and better participates through that action) but the emphasis is on everyone being present and being able to talk freely. The doctor's office is a fundamentally different environment, though. 1. Aside - an unnecessary shame - no one should feel guilt over trying to overcome a disability.
I think it's fair to say the non-technical public has been repeatedly burned by AI companies selling something different from what they're advertising and it's fair to be skeptical as a layperson about your ability to tell a properly HIPAA compliant tool from a non-HIPAA compliant tool.
The examples there are literally meeting friends over coffee and attending a health-care professional.
I have a son and we have to sometimes split appointments across me and my wife. I wish i had a recording or automated AI notes that came to my email (no not to a captive portal I can lose access to) so i can read what my doctor said about my son without it getting filtered through my wifes memory.
Why should I care about your opinion . It’s my convenience your privacy prefs.