Elliot Morris

Let us start, as all good things do, with preconditions:

1. Your organization used to take and publish meeting notes by hand, for at least some meetings

2. At least some of these notes are now being written automatically via LLM transcription services.

This is clearly acceptable to many, or even most people. It’s easy to see why, nobody enjoys taking meeting notes. In times gone by we employed people full time to deal with admin like this, then everyone ended up doing if for themselves when personal computing became a thing, and now we live in the future and nobody has to do it.

So, these notes, you’ve read them right? You actually reference them, you use them? I don’t, because they’re useless. You may disagree with me on this. If you did, you’d probably say something like : “Yes Elliot, they are not as consistently good as human notes, but they’re damn close, and it’s well worth not needing a dedicated note-taker.”

We disagree. However, I’d like you to keep following me on this, because I think you might agree that this isn’t the actual reason that many of us have transitioned into relying on them.

I contend the actual reason is that we never actually cared about meeting notes and we still don’t. We may have intellectually understood they are valuable, but we didn’t care, we intuitively didn’t think the juice was worth the squeeze, and were oh so eager to give up writing them. All LLMs have done is given us a convenient way to abandon parts of our jobs we don’t care to do, yet still pretend that they’re getting done.

Take this example: Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog

"Despite the drawbacks, Keel told the outlet that the tool is saving him “six to eight hours weekly now.”

“Despite the drawbacks.” I wonder what they think the drawbacks are. What is the purpose of these police reports? If it's acceptable for them to have mistakes in them that nobody is responsible for, I wonder at how they be thought of as fit for purpose? If they’re not fit for purpose, but you’re still okay with the trade-off, wouldn’t it be better to just stop taking them? I bet this evokes a reaction in some of you. Not take police reports? But then how can we verify what happened?! How indeed.

I can feel the anger bubbling as I write this, because I bet there are commandments in larger orgs and governmental departments like this one that there must be written notes. Maybe these commandments exist for a reason. LLM notes obviously should not satisfy these unless nobody cared in the first place. Such concrete rules must exist because there is a need for a reliable, audit-able paper trail. If you are plugging LLM notes into a system designed to enforce this sort of paper trail, you haven’t achieved your goal, you’ve just turned what used to be a valuable activity into a compliance ritual. If what you do actually matters at all, this causes real harm.

But heck, it’s hard to blame folk on this. Whilst I am sure some people are abdicating their actual responsibilities by deferring to LLMs, I bet the majority of people are being forced to do this sort of thing pointlessly by terribly managed organizational systems, and I bet they don’t have the power to do anything about it. It is important we do not confuse the two cases. We must not allow necessary responsibility to be abdicated under the auspice of escaping useless procedure. We should instead remove the useless procedure, not hail the workaround as a revelatory new solution to a real problem.

Putting that aside, the more interesting behaviour is how the people empowered to make these calls tend to get stuck on problems where the thing being sacrificed, in this case meeting notes, clearly have some value. If something has obvious value, folk are afraid of being seen as responsible for losing that value, even if the trade off seems worth it. They need a scapegoat, a way to avoid that responsibility, in the same way lumbering organizations “need” to employ management consultants at great expense to tell them to do things they had already decided to do.

You simply must be comfortable making these sorts of value trade-offs, the ones that demands a sacrifice on one side of the scale, if you are to be an effective leader.

You’ll have cottoned on by now to how this isn’t really about LLM meeting notes. Understand what you are doing. Keep doing the things that are about personal responsibility or provide value that is worth the squeeze, and just stop doing the things that are not worth doing. Crucially, stop replacing what you were previously doing with shambling husks of worse than useless ritual and workarounds in silly attempts to pretend you’re making a pure improvement and not a trade-off. All things are trade-offs, and trade-offs don’t need to be perfect, if they were, they wouldn’t be trade-offs.

Yes, this involves honesty and personal risk, responsibility is the name of the game. Are you this timid when you work on the more substantial parts of your organization?

*Elliot turns around, and locks eyes with the entire white collar economy staring sheepishly back at him*

Oh. Right.