Obsidian AI plugin “Smart Connections” found some big holes in my PKM.
I was excited to find the Obsidian AI plugin “Smart Connections,” by Brian Petro; ¹ however, after asking ChatGPT a series of questions about my notes this morning, I’m beginning to see the glaring holes in my 30,000 note personal knowledge management system. The revelation is dishearting, I’ll explain.
Brian describes his “AI-Powered Note Connections for Obsidian,” in the introduction paragraphs to his plugin. The two major features (at this time) are “Smart View” and “Smart Chat.” ²
Smart View
Smart View creates a list of “relevant” notes through embeddings ChatGPT has made to your entries. In addition, the plugin allows you to enter the location of the files you wish to permit access. Relevant suggestions can also be produced via highlighted words or sentences.
Smart Chat
Smart Chat is a powerful AI interactive chatbot for your notes. ³ It is a little rusty around the corners, with improvements on the way, but a significant step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it will also reveal your notes’ most significant weaknesses. You similarly ask Smart Chat questions as you would ChatGPT; however, when you include a self-referential pronoun, i.e., I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, and ours, Smart Chat will provide the relevant response based only on the notes you provided for consideration.
Access to Notes
Using Smart Chat is fun for inquiry questions such as “How many days did I ski in 2022?” “Please write a paragraph about my skiing experience at Eagle Point.” And “Have I written about {blank} before?” Smart Chat responds with answers and a paragraph summarizing my journal entries about the Eagle Point ski trip. Another good question I found was, “Craft a narrative between zettel note 202110031031 and zettel note 201005030651.” Smart Chat summarized each note and said, “One way to craft a narrative between these two notes could be to explore… etc.” Finally, I’m playing around with to-do lists where I ask, “I have 5 minutes at home to complete a to-do. List the possible items.” I have mixed results from Smart Chat so far.
It’s Not the AIs Fault
Less promising are the answers to my inquiries where I expected my years of note-taking, summarization, and blog writing to shine, i.e., “How can I sleep better?” Including the self-referential pronoun “I” triggers the AI to review only my notations on sleep. I’ve had years of sleep-related issues and have written, researched, and blogged about improving my sleep. The response was typical of a ChatGPT reply; however, I found two glaring omissions when I compared my results to asking ChatGPT outright. Brian is working on linking the responses to the notations from which Smart Chat draws its answers, but it is entirely possible I still need to write about the missing items.
My questions regarding habit trackers and checklists yielded similar results; however, the more I moved away from my core topics, the messier the internal responses, highlighting a large language model confined to a small database set.
Reimagining PKM
I suspect Personal Knowledge Management systems, Second Brains, Zettelkastens, and all note-taking systems are heading toward an extinction-level event. Our existing approaches will move toward a scaffolding of questions guided and asked not by us but by artificial intelligence. We will overlay the framework with our answers in the form of blogs, articles, and essays as we do now, and additional questions from the AI will patch the holes.
At some point, I should expect the AI to say, “hey Steve, are you ever going to write about {insert missing sleep-related topic here}?” You have 5 minutes before your next appointment; why don’t you jot down a few thoughts?
Thank you for reading!
While coffee may not be my cup of tea, I do have a passion for beautiful jewelry. If you enjoyed reading my article, I invite you to visit Jewelry Art by Linda, where every piece is lovingly crafted by hand with meticulous attention to detail.
Written April 16, 2023
Editorial assistance by Grammarly.com
Footnotes and References
- Petro, Brian (N.A) https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections
- Ibid
- Ibid
