A blogger calls AI note-takers a creepy third person. HN says that's a secretary

"You bring a literal third person to the table"

This rebuttal answers Joan Westenberg's plea to leave your AI note-taker at home by agreeing with her and turning up the volume. Strip away the AI hype, the author argues, and a real-time note-taker is still "a literal third person" at the table, "just sitting there, listening in on your conversation and writing everything down." How fucking creepy is that, the post asks, how fucking awkward.

The author's own line in the sand was a physiotherapy session. Told the visit would be transcribed by an AI, they said they minded: "She gracefully accepted and wrote notes like a normal human. And if that makes things awkward, then that's not on me." The advice that follows is deliberately low-tech: ask why you even need the assistant, and if you truly must keep a record, "grab a napkin," because "not everything needs to be written down."

The most common reply: that third person had a job title

The dominant pushback in the thread was historical. The silent note-taker isn't a dystopian novelty; for most of business history it was a secretary, sitting in the room writing everything down, and nobody called it creepy.

"Taking minutes/notes in a meeting and then being accountable to follow-up on any action items out of that meeting is just standard business process across industries and across the globe." — tristor, a systems-ops veteran turned product manager, ex-Rackspace and Percona

The objection people actually share is custody, not AI

A second camp said the post aimed at the wrong target. What unsettles them isn't the transcription, or even the model. It's that the recording leaves the room for a company's servers.

"whether a conversation can still be candid and confidential once everyone knows it may become permanent, searchable, and shareable." — an engineer building an offline-first app

Several made the flip explicit: run the model on-device and most of the fear evaporates. As one put it, "IF the AI Note taker would be only on device, it would be less creepy. But at moment everything goes to some companys (and so also more or less direct, to the government too)."

Where the post loses the room

Even sympathetic readers flagged that it slides between two very different rooms, a medical exam and a coffee-shop catch-up, as if they were the same fight.

"an AI transcription of a convo is simply not the same as a third person in the conversation." — a reader who went through both the original and the rebuttal

Others pushed past etiquette to failure modes, noting these tools produce summaries, not just transcripts, and summaries invent things.

"These things are downright dangerous. Now come the replies saying, 'as if human note-takers never made mistakes!'" — a commenter recalling earlier reports of botched AI medical notes

The post told readers to interrogate a note-taker by asking "why" five times. One reader ran that script all the way down, and it curdled into something almost tender:

"Why is that information valuable to you? Because I value you and your opinions." — a commenter who followed the author's own five-whys to the bottom

That's the fault line the thread never bridges. One side hears a person in the room; the other hears a filing cabinet. The etiquette argument is really a custody argument, and until the recording provably stays on your own device, "do you mind?" will keep landing as an accusation to one person and a courtesy to the next.