Anapoly Notebook | Digital Garden
Using AI with your second brain
whilst retaining agency
Status: 🔸 Seed → ✅ Growing → 🔸 Well-formed → 🔸 Adapting → 🔸 Retired
Transparency label: human only
In my experience, the learning and retention of knowledge comes through writing down ideas. The process of thinking about what words to write crystallises half-formed ideas into a fuller understanding, which is then held in my memory. When working with an AI, it can serve a useful purpose in asking me to clarify things, forcing me to think them through and write them down in order to get it to do what I want. But do I begin to lose agency if I then use its output without putting it through my writing down process? By agency, I mean the capacity for independent thought.
I use Obsidian as a personal knowledge management system (PKM) or second brain. It contains many notes. I find it is important to write the notes myself in order to retain the knowledge they contain. However, sometimes it is useful to capture information directly from the web or YouTube, for example when I don't have time to make my own written notes about it. There is an Obsidian plugin to automate this process.
To keep a boundary between my own thinking and AI output, I tag directly-captured notes Contains AI and put them into a separate folder of that name.
There are plugins for Obsidian that can create an embedding for some or all of the notes in a vault. An embedding transforms ordinary words and sentences into numbers (vectors) that AI can understand. The plugin is then able to find connections between an individual note or a subject matter of interest and the embedded content. Because I have separated notes with my own thinking from those that include AI, I will be able to find connections in only one of these areas or in both. If I use those connections to develop my own thinking and then write new notes or edit ones, I can retain agency.
It is possible, also, to chat with an AI about the embedded content of my notes. This can be done by connecting my Obsidian vault to a cloud-based AI such as ChatGPT. Or if I want my thinking to be kept entirely private, I can install an AI locally on my own computer. In effect, this becomes a local equivalent of NotebookLM. It's an interesting and powerful idea.