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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?
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.<p>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.
Every time a new easy-to-use content generation AI tool drops, the collective blood pressure in Google's spam detection department goes up by 1% :D<p>This one should be promising!
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?<p>I understand the idea of cynical marketers wanting to use GPT-3 to churn out keyword nonsense to game Google Search.<p>But why would you want your employees reading/writing AI generated nonsense in your company's workspace?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>- Offline mode. My data is mine, my tables, templates, notes, have no reason to live in your server.<p>- Improve performance. Notion is getting slower with every release.<p>- Full Text Workspace Search.<p>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.
If you actual read what the AI prints when it's asked to create a blog post. It repeats the same thing over and over again.<p>You can sum up the whole blog post in one sentence.<p>Notion AI helps you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing you with suggestions on how to improve them.<p>It writes like how I did when I was a kid in elementary school writing English papers lol.
Maybe they should focus on fixing bugs.
The editor has significant problems. It happened to me that I literally couldn't copy stuff. I had to download as txt and then copy.
Or sometimes you're trying to select a sentence and it selects the whole block, and all these annoying little quirks that I find incredibly enraging.
This is essentially innovation theater for a fairly lackluster core product. Adding AI for a feature no asked for is like straight piping your Honda Civic to make it sound like a race car. At the end of the day you're just driving a loud Honda Civic.
AI is the new 3D printing. Cool novelty that will undoubtedly change the world somehow, but I hope we avoid letting it become this creation that is played out within 5years, overapplied, and shoved into any process whether it improves the product or not because its "the future". I'm about two AI support bots from snapping.
I've seen the benefit of AI for completing sentences, or lines of code, and I can imagine the benefit to creative writing where things do not have to be factually correct, however writing in Notion is typically writing about something in the real world.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
This is how Skynet takes over, isn’t it? We thought it was going to be fighter planes and attack satellites. Giving the AI overlords the ability to subtly seed ideas into planning docs the world over locks in a more bureaucratic apocalypse. I need to brush off my screenwriting software and ask the AI to write a script with the prompt “Office Space meets Terminator.”
Writing is one field that I think won't be able to achieve the 'human' touch anytime soon. Art? Sure, as we have already seen with DALL-E and the like. Music? Doubtful (look up Kandrake-Z for an example), but not sure if it will expand beyond plunderphonics and noise. But writing? Meh.<p>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.
Even their examples seem better off as just templates of different speech patterns. For example Minto pyramid is used, <a href="https://untools.co/" rel="nofollow">https://untools.co/</a>
Thought this is an April Fool's joke kind of thing, but apparently they're serious?<p>That's said, the spell checker is nice and the translation would be helpful too.
As others have said, they should focus on improving their product by fixing annoying bug and adding the features people are actually waiting for instead of more impressive but way less useful stuff like this. I left my own notion in limbo about a year ago because supposedly Google Calendar integration was just about to roll out, and that was the killer feature that would make my workflow really useful. Then nothing happened, and I barely use it because it's still "unfinished". Any recommendation for something similar but a little more powerful and hackable for a developer oriented workflow ?
How long until AI generated content becomes a political agenda? Not sure why this soulless stuff is being embraced by everyone but I see it as the nuclear spam bomb for the entire Web.
Highly skeptical of AI applications like this, unless you have a personal active learning model that you can refine over time. Otherwise, it can only really answer broad canned questions like "10 ways async communication is more productive". As the other commenter pointed out, seems like it would be way more useful to use AI to summarize existing content and suggest links than to pretend like it can do the work of an employee with zero context.
Who's bearish on AI used like this? Seems like everyone is packaging the cutting edge work/research and putting into this same "bucket".<p>Will it go the way of 3D tvs? Interesting for 2 years then gone? We'll see.<p>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.
That page is now missing. Maybe they’ve changed their mind. Generative AI is one of the few sectors that gets VCs still excited these days, but the text version of it is fraught with unresolved problems. Try getting rare code or the inauguration poem in it for completion and see what comes out. Spoiler: it’s either direct copy or gibberish (content that any good editor would remove) that wastes an ever increasing chunk of humanity’s time. The avid users of generative text today are LAZY and don’t clean up or improve the content - they are compensated and rewarded for word counts and that’s exactly what they get in droves from GPT3. If Notion implements generative features, it needs to label those notes generated, to prevent its systems from filling with crud nobody cares to read over time. If they do content summaries, will they stop with that.<p>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).
The article zips by kind of quickly, so I transcribed it:<p>> <i>Introducing Notion Al</i><p>> <i>Notion Al: Your New Digital Assistant</i><p>> <i>Introduction</i><p>> <i>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.</i><p>> <i>What is Notion Al?</i><p>> <i>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</i><p>----<p>> <i>Promotion Ideas</i><p>- Make a video showing all the features of Notion Al<p>- Create a blog post highlighting the benefits of using Notion Al<p>- Give a presentation to potential users about the advantages of Notion Al<p>- Reach out to social media influencers and ask them to try out Notion Al<p>- Give free trials to users who are interested in trying out the software
To anyone who is frustrated with Notion's official client:<p>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?<p>Full disclosure: I'd like to gauge interest in a product like this as I'm interested in working on solving it.
Having watched the video, the kind of content Notion AI generates is the kind I typically stop reading after a few sentences. By then it becomes clear that the article has nothing to say, was written by a non-expert, and is really nothing more than filler. It can't help me solve a problem and won't offer any new insights.<p>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.<p>Notion AI does a pretty good job of mimicking an HR-level understanding of a topic. And that's progress.<p>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.
Generative AI, especially for writing, is really good at producing mediocre content.<p>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.
Off topic: Any suggestions for a Notion-like knowledge management app with decent handwriting support except OneNote?
I need handwriting in order to memorize and structured data (tables/boards/lists etc) in order to be efficient.
I have yet to see a text-suggestion tool that is as good as GitHub Copilot in terms of speed and quality. I’ve looked at Lex from Every, and Galactica , not impressed with either of them. I can almost get better results by just writing a comment section with Copilot.<p><a href="https://lex.page/" rel="nofollow">https://lex.page/</a><p>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.
Imagine if the training set includes personal data similar to copilot and particular licensing... that would be horrendous. Notion should at least disclose how the training set is created.
This is pretty cool!<p>I started working on GPT3 integration for Notion [0]; but I guess that was obvious to have AI integrated in Notion.<p>The question is when will we get AI generated images in Notion? Well, then I can shut down my side project [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/kiru_io/status/1572290853103865856" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/kiru_io/status/1572290853103865856</a><p>[1] <a href="https://slashdreamer.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slashdreamer.com/</a>
Sad to know that instead of a proper API or offline support the notion team has decided to spent their time on AI.<p>Notion turned 8 this year and it still doesn't have the aforementioned offline support, no repeating dates and events and no plugin support.<p>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.
I use large language model for work and use Notion daily.<p>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.<p>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.
Tapping this link on my mobile phone automatically opened the Notion app which led to a "this content does not exist" error.<p>Maybe the AI can fix it.
I'm very wary of all these companies building their offerings on GPT-3. It's dependent on OpenAI until it's cheap enough to host your own instance, and then they wouldn't have a proper service to offer anyway.<p>Also, GPT-3 completion is pretty hacky, and anyone who needs it on an information organization pipeline is not taking it seriously anyway.
This is cool. Not sure about the privacy implications of this. Nowadays anything with AI after it makes me think twice before using it. Especially if it's as critical & personal as a notes app. Who knows in what ways they'll be using the collected data (it's obvious that they will collect data to improve the AI).
Is this trained or fine-tuned on the content of existing Notion customers like GitHub Copilot?<p>The FAQ is unclear:<p>> 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.
This is awesome! i was searching for a writing tool integrated into Notion just yesterday<p>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<p>[0] <a href="https://notaku.so" rel="nofollow">https://notaku.so</a>
I will join others to conclude that, being VC backed it what makes you do things like this and is a signal that company will work on more shallow features and focus on growth for growth sake.<p>Notion is solid app and idea and it would be a shame to became just one more thing that is just noise.
The sample generated blog post for Notion AI scrolls by pretty quickly, but appears to be (obviously) completely unrelated to what Notion AI actually is. How is this any more helpful than just having a template? The language model has no clue what your new product is.
Not sure what Notion is using under the hood, but it makes me think about how good GPT-3 is... What will it be like in 10 or 20 years when this tech is dramatically better and is commoditized, available everywhere? It's hard to grasp.
Seems like a pointless toy feature that will be left to rot when people realize that making it useful is actually really hard.<p>There have been some cool developments in AI recently, but it's just not free magic, and it might never be.
I can't wait for this trend of companies forcing AI "features" into their systems to be over. I get why they're doing it though, It's just such a mundane and safe way to market your product.
Imagine being a Notion user that’s been wishing for sensible things like offline mode or performance improvements on large databases/docs and finding out they’ve spent their time and money on this instead.
I wonder, if it can be generated by an AI, maybe it shouldn't be written down. Current AI can only generate what most people already know, and the purpose of writing is to express something new.
I’m curious to know what the profitability of a feature like this is?<p>Are generative text models and image models cheap enough for consumer products or do you need to charge a premium?
My sincere fuck you goes to all the miserable transhumanists who give up all their human essence, including creativity, to their corporate-controlled AI overlords.
The intro video definitely reads like satire. This is either a very early April Fool's joke, or just a silly toy that Notion is marketing for some reason.
Got a FB ad yesterday inviting me to join xyz to get my very own AI friend to interact with, for a monthly fee of course. With picture of alluring young lady.
w.t.f... fix the tables instead, let me copy a row without having to duplicate the table, turn into a database, copy the rows and paste in original table
in my humble opinion Time Magazine should make AI their annual personality of the year.<p>It will either be zelensky or putin but that would in my opinion be a mistake
With all of the exciting directions knowledge management has been moving in lately, it's disheartening to see that Notion's product vision is already so uninspired.<p>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).<p>... 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.<p>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.
Why is this all so buggy? I don’t know why people like Notion so much; I discover bugs literally every day using it with our team (we are paying members with 2 companies).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm looking forward to the coming arms race: crappy articles and memos expanded and mostly written by software <i>vs</i> automatic summarizers that strip out the padding and puffery and just leave any useful part.*<p>This "limitless power of AI" (their words) addition to Notion is a great example. It's a kind of anti-compression.<p>* 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`