by antouank on 11/16/22, 2:11 PM with 321 comments
by zamfi on 11/16/22, 5:53 PM
That said, every implementation (including Notion's, which admittedly I haven't dug into very much) seems to be same stale "predict the next sentence" interaction, which reminds me very much of the early web's "it's like a store, but online!" vibe. In the sense of "I built this because it was straightforward to build" and not "I built this because I think it best meets what users need". To be fair, building the former can be a prerequisite to building the latter.
But honestly, most writing comes in editing; where is the help for editing? For rephrasing, or for making text flow more easily, or for reorganizing an outline and having the text update to reflect that higher-level reorganization? Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
As someone who writes a lot (granted, in an academic setting), "first draft" is definitely part of the process, but it's just one piece! I suspect that in a few years today's tools will feel like ancient chisel-and-stone implements compared with what will come online. Can we get there already?
by m_ke on 11/16/22, 2:39 PM
by bluetidepro on 11/16/22, 5:44 PM
It literally is a SIMPLE fix, and I don't say that lightly. Since it's a web app you can just add a basic CSS media query for mobile devices to make the padding/sizing larger for mobile devices.
by spaceman_2020 on 11/16/22, 2:37 PM
This one should be promising!
by site-packages1 on 11/16/22, 5:18 PM
by pembrook on 11/16/22, 5:04 PM
I understand the idea of cynical marketers wanting to use GPT-3 to churn out keyword nonsense to game Google Search.
But why would you want your employees reading/writing AI generated nonsense in your company's workspace?
In any case, since GPT-3 is open to everyone now, I think if you're building an AI copywriting tool (eg. Jasper and the 1,000+ others) you're going to have a rough go of it. It's now a commodity feature, not a standalone product.
As evidenced by this move from Notion, the GPT-3 API is just going to be bolted on as a feature in whatever tool you're already using.
by masterof0 on 11/16/22, 4:05 PM
- Offline mode. My data is mine, my tables, templates, notes, have no reason to live in your server.
- Improve performance. Notion is getting slower with every release.
- Full Text Workspace Search.
This are features customers actually want. Show some customer obsession and cut the crap with that GPT-3 non-sense. You are helping spammers to automate their workflow, on creating irrelevant posts that match search keys.We already have copy.ai and a ton of other services that do just that.
by impulser_ on 11/16/22, 3:03 PM
You can sum up the whole blog post in one sentence.
Notion AI helps you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing you with suggestions on how to improve them.
It writes like how I did when I was a kid in elementary school writing English papers lol.
by martopix on 11/16/22, 3:45 PM
by boh on 11/16/22, 3:50 PM
by boh on 11/16/22, 3:54 PM
by abrichr on 11/16/22, 3:04 PM
by aliqot on 11/16/22, 2:41 PM
by danpalmer on 11/16/22, 2:40 PM
The problem with AI text generation is that it does not have that real world context. A great example is the first example on this page: writing a blog post announcing Notion's AI generation.
The AI text generator does not know the feature set, and therefore either the content is going to lack any detail about the product, or it's going to have incorrect detail, in both cases providing no value.
What are use-cases for this that people will actually benefit from? Creative writing - sure. Brainstorming? Maybe for very vague and basic topics that don't need any business context. But more than that?
by taylorfinley on 11/16/22, 5:50 PM
by remram on 11/16/22, 2:50 PM
by sidkhanooja on 11/16/22, 2:56 PM
I don't know if anyone even uses content-generating AIs like this for writing - but I'd be glad to change my mind by seeing some hard numbers. I mean, except for incomprehensible content-generated articles that pop up on searches only because of PageRank's flaws.
by bearjaws on 11/16/22, 2:43 PM
by flakiness on 11/16/22, 2:57 PM
That's said, the spell checker is nice and the translation would be helpful too.
by sfitz on 11/16/22, 4:02 PM
by leokeba on 11/16/22, 5:54 PM
by netcraft on 11/16/22, 2:42 PM
by marban on 11/16/22, 3:36 PM
by skc on 11/16/22, 3:05 PM
Poems? Really?
by phailhaus on 11/16/22, 2:41 PM
by sergiotapia on 11/16/22, 2:52 PM
Will it go the way of 3D tvs? Interesting for 2 years then gone? We'll see.
Not to mention these companies are 100% training their "bot" with your data. Notion will learn from user's notes. Replit will learn from their new "bounty marketplace" they launched. Github from the repositories. Etc.
by dzink on 11/16/22, 3:21 PM
That said, generative AI is a feature, that will go everywhere soon - it will be the next copy paste. If developers and product people are not careful, it will also invoke regulation that demands generated content to be labeled to remain legal (or you will loose the reader’s trust in your content).
by hedora on 11/16/22, 6:19 PM
> Introducing Notion Al
> Notion Al: Your New Digital Assistant
> Introduction
> Notion Al is a new artificial intelligence feature from the productivity app Notion. Notion Al is designed to help you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing suggestions on how to improve them. In this blog post, we'll introduce you to Notion Al and show you how it can help you get more out of your work.
> What is Notion Al?
> Notion Al is an artificial intelligence feature that is designed to help you be more productive. Notion Al uses machine learning to understand your work habits and provides suggestions on how to improve them. For example, if you tend to procrastinate on certain tasks, Notion Al will suggest ways to overcome that behavior
----
> Promotion Ideas
- Make a video showing all the features of Notion Al
- Create a blog post highlighting the benefits of using Notion Al
- Give a presentation to potential users about the advantages of Notion Al
- Reach out to social media influencers and ask them to try out Notion Al
- Give free trials to users who are interested in trying out the software
by no_wizard on 11/16/22, 5:28 PM
Notion recently opened up their entire API correct? This would leave a market for 3rd party clients that are snappier and innovation without having to leave the notion platform as a whole correct?
Full disclosure: I'd like to gauge interest in a product like this as I'm interested in working on solving it.
by SevenNation on 11/16/22, 4:42 PM
That said, it wasn't too long ago that the writing style itself was easy to identify as AI-generated, or even borderline grammatically incorrect.
Notion AI does a pretty good job of mimicking an HR-level understanding of a topic. And that's progress.
I just wonder what it will take to get to a point when the output is of the quality I'd associate with human subject-expert writers who know how to engage with a reader.
by sn0w_crash on 11/16/22, 3:41 PM
I think people will quickly realize that poor AI-generated content is the new spam and we’ll see a surge of both algos and people prioritizing human-created content as a result.
by pkos98 on 11/16/22, 4:25 PM
by d4rkp4ttern on 11/17/22, 12:03 PM
Mem.ai recently raised $20M and they supposedly have AI-assisted writing but I haven’t tried it. But I think it’s really lame that even after all that money raised they still don’t support Math/Latex notation.
by sanjayio on 11/16/22, 4:49 PM
by kiru_io on 11/16/22, 2:53 PM
I started working on GPT3 integration for Notion [0]; but I guess that was obvious to have AI integrated in Notion.
The question is when will we get AI generated images in Notion? Well, then I can shut down my side project [1]
by j-krieger on 11/16/22, 2:52 PM
Notion turned 8 this year and it still doesn't have the aforementioned offline support, no repeating dates and events and no plugin support.
Why companies prioritise a product nobody asked for instead of features which a large majority of users are vocal in support of is beyond me. I can only hope a competitor will force them to shift their focus.
by ggnore7452 on 11/16/22, 6:44 PM
while I like the "AI" part (the large language model), think it would be more interesting and productive to use same backend for full text semantic search & question answering or summarizations.
But it is cool to see Notion trying this way, kinda curious to see the results when so many people have access to this type of generative model.
by TechBro8615 on 11/16/22, 4:13 PM
Maybe the AI can fix it.
by fareesh on 11/16/22, 2:54 PM
by terminal_d on 11/16/22, 2:59 PM
Also, GPT-3 completion is pretty hacky, and anyone who needs it on an information organization pipeline is not taking it seriously anyway.
by thecodrr on 11/16/22, 5:55 PM
by politician on 11/16/22, 3:21 PM
The FAQ is unclear:
> Any information used to power Notion AI will be shared with our partners for the sole purpose of providing you with the Notion AI features. We do not allow any partners or 3rd parties to use your data for training their models, or any other purpose.
by xmorse on 11/16/22, 2:49 PM
Together with Notaku [0] i can now create blog posts and help articles much faster, choosing Notion for my websites CMS was the right idea
by desireco42 on 11/16/22, 2:59 PM
Notion is solid app and idea and it would be a shame to became just one more thing that is just noise.
by Imnimo on 11/16/22, 6:52 PM
by deegles on 11/16/22, 8:03 PM
by TillE on 11/16/22, 3:56 PM
There have been some cool developments in AI recently, but it's just not free magic, and it might never be.
by Hallmane on 11/16/22, 6:04 PM
by r2222 on 11/16/22, 6:18 PM
by QuadrupleA on 11/16/22, 5:10 PM
by jmugan on 11/16/22, 3:40 PM
by faizshah on 11/16/22, 2:42 PM
Are generative text models and image models cheap enough for consumer products or do you need to charge a premium?
by ccbccccbbcccbb on 11/16/22, 4:49 PM
by keb_ on 11/16/22, 5:48 PM
by jonnycomputer on 11/16/22, 5:43 PM
by angryGhost on 11/16/22, 3:16 PM
by BaudouinVH on 11/16/22, 3:29 PM
It will either be zelensky or putin but that would in my opinion be a mistake
by thedangler on 11/16/22, 3:07 PM
by lma21 on 11/16/22, 3:28 PM
by skilled on 11/16/22, 5:20 PM
by NexRebular on 11/16/22, 5:36 PM
by colonwqbang on 11/16/22, 4:59 PM
by melony on 11/16/22, 4:52 PM
by Wronnay on 11/16/22, 4:36 PM
by KidComputer on 11/16/22, 3:26 PM
Nope, I'm out.
by SN76477 on 11/16/22, 6:10 PM
How about custom colors ? :(
by __alexs on 11/16/22, 3:07 PM
by thatwasunusual on 11/16/22, 3:12 PM
by IceHegel on 11/16/22, 3:27 PM
by ilmiont on 11/16/22, 4:46 PM
by prvt on 11/16/22, 3:50 PM
by IgorPartola on 11/16/22, 2:53 PM
by WolfOliver on 11/16/22, 4:09 PM
by BaudouinVH on 11/16/22, 3:30 PM
by SirensOfTitan on 11/16/22, 3:12 PM
Particular in the corporate space, the problem of finding relevant knowledge (and keeping that knowledge up to date) is a really hard problem. I think competitors like Mem are going to eat Notion's lunch here (categorization and perhaps tagging of stale content is a much more reasonable application of ML than this).
... further, Notion's performance is so absolutely awful that my very small company had to stop using it. Latency is incredibly relevant to note taking and writing apps.
The marketing page example is also so contrived: "Write a blog post introducing Notion's new AI feature." How would the AI even know what that feature even is? Where's the context? It seems like this just proposes static solutions to dynamic problems.
by tluyben2 on 11/16/22, 3:22 PM
So another lame one; I click on this article in iOS safari and it pops open my iOS Notion app saying ‘this content doesn’t exist’. Well done! I will add it to the list, in Notion.
It is the system with the highest popularity while also having the most bugs that I used in a long time. But not for long.
It is also slow; started using some similar (but less feature rich) products and things like Joplin are so nice and snappy that I tend to forget the missing features.
by gumby on 11/16/22, 3:43 PM
This "limitless power of AI" (their words) addition to Notion is a great example. It's a kind of anti-compression.
* Ah, turns out this second feature has been baked into unix for decades. Most of the email I get and pages I am offered as output of a web search can be summarized using this handy shell command: `echo < /dev/null`