How Notion AI Alpha is Already Augmenting My Learning and Writing

this will change everything

Yesterday I got alpha-testing access to Notion AI.

For those who don’t know me, I’ve been using Notion everyday for the last 2 years. So, you can imagine that for me, getting access to Notion AI was akin to waking up on Christmas day in 2010 and opening up a Nintendo DSI XL. (true story btw)

Notion AI is a writing assistant built straight into Notion’s text editor. Imagine while in school you were writing essays for a class in Google Docs or Word and your brain just wasn’t working. Well, Notion AI could have helped you spit out a first draft. Albeit, not a good one, but with a little teaching, Notion AI can produce quite remarkable outputs.

After obsessively playing around with Notion AI between yesterday and this frigid morning, I made a discovery: you can teach Notion AI to use data points to produce enhanced results. Let me give you a real example.

Using Notion AI to Write a Newsletter Description

While launching Easy Education this morning, I decided “Why not let Notion AI help me write a short description of my newsletter?”. So, I went into the Notion page, where I had previously outlined the key aspects of the newsletter (pictured below) and prepared to let the AI rip.

some of my ramblings about what Easy Education should be about

To make the AI work, it’s as simple as typing in “/Help me write” and then it prompts you with the question “What would you like to write about?”. So I typed this:

What’s insane, is that most of my points seem like rambling, but the AI took it and ran with it faster than I ever could.

This is what the AI came up with in 5-10 seconds:

I made a few minor edits to grammar and spelling, but otherwise, this is what the AI produced.

Now, this isn’t exactly what I envisioned, but the way this is written is compelling and detailed enough to be published and no reader would bat an eye. And amazingly, the AI took my otherwise incoherent ramblings, that I typed in 1-2 minutes during a brainstorm session, and wrote a description that flows smoothly!

Some Realizations I Made in This Experiment

Through this brief experiment writing a newsletter with Notion AI, I made a few realizations.

I noticed immediately that Notion AI removes the grunt work of writing. And because of this, Notion AI gave me back the time and energy needed to fact-check the information or fine tune it before shipping it. Instead of arduously treading water while clinging to crumbling driftwood (as writing felt like before), Notion AI is like a US Coast Guard helicopter that yanks you out of the water and flies you to new mental horizons.

Second, I noticed that Notion AI makes amazing use of data points you give it. People say that AI is scary because it could spread even more misinformation, but I’d venture to say AI like it will reduce misinformation because you’re able to feed it accurate data points. People in the future will spend more time reviewing the outputs of AI rather than creating the outputs themselves. Fact-checking jobs will become of even greater use in a society driven by unpredictable AI.

Third, Notion AI forces you to think clearer about what you want. Notion AI prompts you to feed it information it can use to generate text. And the more clear what you feed it is, the better it operates. So, rather than trudging along writing unclear prose, we can use our unused mental effort for producing clearer desires that can then be translating into reality through the use of AI. AI shortcuts the process of laboriously writing by giving you the material needed to get your brain rolling and frees up your mind to think about the problem and not get caught up in it.

Final Thoughts

After only 2 days of using Notion AI, I’m already blown away.

I’ll be running more experiments and sharing them with you all. Although for some, they see AI as terrifying, I see AI as promising. My learning and writing process has already been augmented dramatically through this single experiment and I’m curious to see what many more discoveries I can make.