Don’t allow AI to take over your knowledge management

Curtis Mchale writes about The State of Notetaking for 2024 — PKM Weekly Issue 100.

I think that the appeal of AI hits the same chord for many people looking at their notes. They want to have neatly compiled notes with clearly thought-out ideas that resonate with others. They want to be done with the hard work of writing their ideas down poorly 20,000 times until they come up with a single good idea that they can run with.

People figure AI will do this for them, but if your notes are crap to begin with, the output of any AI will also be crap.

This is a good reminder that while many apps are gaining AI superpowers, the LLMs can’t replace our thinking and ideas. Sure, they can help spark ideas and maybe some other use cases, but they won’t do the hard work for you. Especially when it comes to personal knowledge management. What’s the point of handling over your learning to AI? The real learning comes from doing the work to understand something and how it relates to other things, not by letting some software do it for you.

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