There are hundreds of "use AI to help you draft text" apps out there, and it really feels like a "feature, not product" category of thing. So I'm glad to see a larger player like Notion integrate this feature.
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?
We've been building a new kind of collaborative text editor (https://www.orchard.ink) keeping all of this in mind! We're trying to reimagine writing workflows, focusing on creative commands for editing that are easily accessible through a Cmd-K. The generated suggestions are displayed as Google Docs-style comments that you can cycle through until you find one you like.
Wasn't planning on making this public so soon (it's only been 2 weeks), but thought people here would be interested in checking it out. Got a lot of changes coming, so stay tuned! Happy to discuss at kevin[at]village.dev
I tried typing something. I don't understand what it takes for one of the commands to actually get AI involved in my text. Either that or the button click events weren't firing. I noticed the template lists were all blank; do I need to make templates somewhere first and then start writing?
I know Grammarly gets a lot of hate but their value really is in the editing process. Pro features are awesome and provides you with helpful tweaks based on your tone preferences.
> reorganizing an outline and having the text update to reflect that higher-level reorganization
Can you elaborate on this particular point and how you would see it work in a collaborative doc/workspace?
Outlining is very underrated as a method of editing and organization, and most outliners are often designed for offline and personal use. I can see a lot of potential in adding automation to how you can organize and connect multiple nodes across outlines.
P.S. David Pierce wrote an in-depth review [1] with some interesting use cases. He was the one that originally broke Notion's story on WSJ a few years back.
> 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?
Current models can kind of do this, e.g. you could give some text to GPT-3 and ask it to do this. Not sure what the limit on the input length before results degraded would be. But yep, would be nice to see this out there in a nice interface and working well.
> Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
Semantic search could be used for this, e.g. finding blocks of text similar to what you've already written
But yep, this stuff isn't all nicely packaged in one place
The editing process is a lot harder to build around than the more straightforward "continue this text for me". Partially because the models are really suited to do the latter out of the box, and partially because there's more nuance and subjectivity on the latter and it's harder to make it work well today.
That said, totally doable. (We put most of our effort into AI for human editing and control with Sudowrite.)
These are all great points but Notion is not an AI company. They are most likely using gpt3 or equivalent in the backend to provide a (rather gimmicky) feature, that's it.
I noticed Grammarly just entered the AI summarization space for email. https://www.grammarly.com/recap. I haven't tested it yet, but saw the Gmail banner last week.
I found that in my current job I don't so much need a summarization service, but a translation service; what does the writer actually want me to know and to do? I got an email the other day with a lot of brain farts, grainy screenshots, and I had to read it five times just to boil it down to "change this tracked URL to that one".
Sort of unrelated (but someone at Notion may actually see it here): PLEASE NOTION, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, make the tap targets for "to-do" lists larger on mobile devices. I can't stand making a to-do list in Notion if I know I have to use it on mobile. 9/10 times I tap the box to check it off, and it goes to edit mode instead of "checking it". It drives me crazy. Make it more mobile friendly, or make it an option to make it larger.
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.
They're in the business of pushing new features. This is why problems like this (and many others) will go unfixed for a long time. Long gone are the days of prioritizing fixes in Notion (which BTW their "performance fix" before they hit hyper growth was abysmal).
The day bug fixes drive sales you will see companies prioritizing them. This isn’t impossible either, you just have to make “no open bugs” a marketing term.
For me the number 1 reason of not using notion for all my note taking needs, is that the app is super slow on my device. Granted it is an old LG G6, but there are also apps, which are quite responsive.
For the last month or so, on a daily basis, I have been getting the same spam messages (subject line: "You've been chosen”) in my inbox, often classified as important. No amount of reporting them as spam seem to help.
However, what ended up in my spam folder are emails from Amazon informing me about winning $100 in their sweepstakes. (When I found them it was too late to claim the prize as confirmed by Amazon's rep.)
I get that spam is hard, but weighing an account owner's signals more than other signals seems like a good strategy. (And if it is not, please do correct me!)
I have been getting those emails too, and I noticed that they get automatically send to spam ~5 minutes after I receive them.
I seem to be getting a spam email of this kind almost every day for the last ~6 months. Maybe the spammer found a way to prevent fingerprinting by Google and each batch of emails only gets automatically marked as spam after so many people manually mark it?
It has been the same for me. A small but noteworthy fraction of legitimate emails go to Spam and illegitimate emails come into Inbox; in spite of marking "spam" or "not spam" multiple times.
It's going to be real fun when more than half of "user" generated content on the net will have been generated by AI content farms: forum comments, code, videos, pictures, entire websites.
I honestly think this is how we reach this "dead internet" meme. We're probably less than a decade away from this.
EDIT: here's my bold prediction. In the next 10 years, a very successful content aggregator (imagine Reddit, Instagram or Tiktok), where content is exclusively and openly AI generated, will reach the Alexa top 100 ranking.
We will have HN users saying we're too old and we just don't get why it is more fun to mindlessly get your dopamine fix from scrolling and liking AI generated images.
I'm terrified at the thought of all this hollow, low-on-details content that's about to hit the internet. Interestingly, if this degrades Google's search result quality, it could be an opportunity for someone else to create a new search engine.
> I'm terrified at the thought of all this hollow, low-on-details content that's about to hit the internet.
Honestly it feels like "hollow, low-on-details content" hit the internet at least 5 years ago. Developments in indexing and searching have incentivized writing of low-quality content that makes it to the top of results, and here we are
Honestly, no reason why we will have the same search experience as we do today in 5 years.
I expect search engines to be more like an AI assistant.
I don’t think Google can pull that off. Not because they don’t have the expertise for it (they do) but because their organisation is built around monetizing ads and an AI assistant might not work with it.
Already buulding one. Assuming content like this will be ad-supported (what is the other way to monetize it? nobody would pay to read it) Kagi is already successful at downranking sites with a lot of ads.
If your site has a lot of fresh, unique content on a topic you appear to be an authority about related search terms and your search engine rank goes up. So pair a bunch of AI generated pages with ads or e-commerce and you’ve got a spam-driven revenue model and we have a worse internet full of regurgitated AI content.
I think their point is that if both real humans and spambots are using AI to generate their articles, then detecting which one is spam becomes that much more difficult.
This is where I see natural language AI causing a real kerfuffle. We're probably already reading bot spam articles without realizing.
I was a user of Notion for a while but ended up moving to Obsidian, which solves a similar set of problems without the bugs. I’m seeing in this announcement that rather than focus on making a better product or fixing things that are broken, they’re jumping into the AI hype train. Seems like I made the right decision to switch to Obsidian, and over the last year have really enjoyed it.
Isn't Notion supposed to be an internal workspace for your company?
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.
The first use case in the demo is generating a blog post, so I’d assume that they’re trying to win the “cynical marketers wanting to use GPT-3 to churn out keyword nonsense to game Google Search” market. I know of some marketing teams that use notion for content management.
Congrats on launching the feature, which I will never use.
If someone from Notion is reading this, I humbly suggest a few other features that might actually make an impact.
- 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.
I am a raving Notion fan. It's one of the few products that I just adore.
Maybe my tolerance level is high, or maybe my hardware is good, but actual performance is acceptable.
I do hope that Notion does improve offline mode. A single page works that is already loaded works wonderfully. Syncing has been non-problematic for me. I wonder why my phone and mac can't cache all the pages indefinitely, which would allow me to work completely offline.
Also, search needs work. Both search from the "search button" and the search that pops up when I type "@bla" are becoming less useful with each additional page in my workspace.
Finally, where are tags? Please please please add the ability to add ad-hoc tags to each block and page, the same way I can add comments to each block and page. And then give me the ability to view all tagged items as a kind of virtual page, or a type of database.
I'm at a point where I type things like tagIdeasToTry in the actual text and then use search to find all blocks that have that tag. But that requires mental effort, and fighting with the search functionality to get back results. I've even considered @mentioning special pages and then using backlinks as a way of categorizing content, but that only works at page level, and is clunky.
Offline mode would impact the most users, but they are purposefully avoiding this feature because it's not sexy. As a paid Notion user, it's infuriating that they spent engineering time on this stupid AI non-sense in front of things that paying users have actually been asking for.
Yes on all three points! Especially search. Notion’s search is so painfully slow. Whenever I try to link a row to another row the loader sounds for 2+ secs, even if I’m searching a table with <10 rows.
But it understands your work habits! Also, it uses machine learning to understand your work habits! This makes you more productive by understanding your work habits.
Yeah I thought at first the video was skipping or rewinding or something when I tried to play-pause-play my way though it as it kept repeating essentially the same thing over and over.
Readit News
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?
Wasn't planning on making this public so soon (it's only been 2 weeks), but thought people here would be interested in checking it out. Got a lot of changes coming, so stay tuned! Happy to discuss at kevin[at]village.dev
Can you elaborate on this particular point and how you would see it work in a collaborative doc/workspace?
Outlining is very underrated as a method of editing and organization, and most outliners are often designed for offline and personal use. I can see a lot of potential in adding automation to how you can organize and connect multiple nodes across outlines.
P.S. David Pierce wrote an in-depth review [1] with some interesting use cases. He was the one that originally broke Notion's story on WSJ a few years back.
[1] https://twitter.com/pierce/status/1592882875254595584
Current models can kind of do this, e.g. you could give some text to GPT-3 and ask it to do this. Not sure what the limit on the input length before results degraded would be. But yep, would be nice to see this out there in a nice interface and working well.
> Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
Semantic search could be used for this, e.g. finding blocks of text similar to what you've already written
But yep, this stuff isn't all nicely packaged in one place
The editing process is a lot harder to build around than the more straightforward "continue this text for me". Partially because the models are really suited to do the latter out of the box, and partially because there's more nuance and subjectivity on the latter and it's harder to make it work well today.
That said, totally doable. (We put most of our effort into AI for human editing and control with Sudowrite.)
[looks like whatever you're writing has already been written in this workspace]
I’ve been toying with the idea of making a browser extension that summarizes pages into ~5 bullets, <20 words each. And maybe a picture.
Someone please make this.
Too lazy to read walls of text. Too lazy to build the extension myself.
I imagine you just need to wrap that in a browser plug-in. Or maybe already exists.
https://tldrthis.com/
https://www.summari.com/products/chrome
Etc etc
Of course no one will lay them off for that.
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.
This one should be promising!
For the last month or so, on a daily basis, I have been getting the same spam messages (subject line: "You've been chosen”) in my inbox, often classified as important. No amount of reporting them as spam seem to help.
However, what ended up in my spam folder are emails from Amazon informing me about winning $100 in their sweepstakes. (When I found them it was too late to claim the prize as confirmed by Amazon's rep.)
I get that spam is hard, but weighing an account owner's signals more than other signals seems like a good strategy. (And if it is not, please do correct me!)
Is this for real?
I seem to be getting a spam email of this kind almost every day for the last ~6 months. Maybe the spammer found a way to prevent fingerprinting by Google and each batch of emails only gets automatically marked as spam after so many people manually mark it?
Are you joking? Surely this is not something that exists.
I honestly think this is how we reach this "dead internet" meme. We're probably less than a decade away from this.
EDIT: here's my bold prediction. In the next 10 years, a very successful content aggregator (imagine Reddit, Instagram or Tiktok), where content is exclusively and openly AI generated, will reach the Alexa top 100 ranking.
We will have HN users saying we're too old and we just don't get why it is more fun to mindlessly get your dopamine fix from scrolling and liking AI generated images.
Honestly it feels like "hollow, low-on-details content" hit the internet at least 5 years ago. Developments in indexing and searching have incentivized writing of low-quality content that makes it to the top of results, and here we are
I expect search engines to be more like an AI assistant.
I don’t think Google can pull that off. Not because they don’t have the expertise for it (they do) but because their organisation is built around monetizing ads and an AI assistant might not work with it.
This is where I see natural language AI causing a real kerfuffle. We're probably already reading bot spam articles without realizing.
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.
- 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.
Maybe my tolerance level is high, or maybe my hardware is good, but actual performance is acceptable.
I do hope that Notion does improve offline mode. A single page works that is already loaded works wonderfully. Syncing has been non-problematic for me. I wonder why my phone and mac can't cache all the pages indefinitely, which would allow me to work completely offline.
Also, search needs work. Both search from the "search button" and the search that pops up when I type "@bla" are becoming less useful with each additional page in my workspace.
Finally, where are tags? Please please please add the ability to add ad-hoc tags to each block and page, the same way I can add comments to each block and page. And then give me the ability to view all tagged items as a kind of virtual page, or a type of database.
I'm at a point where I type things like tagIdeasToTry in the actual text and then use search to find all blocks that have that tag. But that requires mental effort, and fighting with the search functionality to get back results. I've even considered @mentioning special pages and then using backlinks as a way of categorizing content, but that only works at page level, and is clunky.
Notion, please help an addict get his fix.
I’m not aware of any block level tag though.
Exactly, I can't remember a single time when AI-generated spam articles that you find on google search frontpage was useful
I couldn't agree more than I already do.
Without this "feature" I will never use Notion. Offline mode is a minimum for me to even look at such an information handling product.
Deleted Comment
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.
Sounds like some next-gen Lorem Ipsum.