We are starting the rollout of AI Note Cleanup (BETA) – Feedback conversation

[Federico Simionato 1,021]

Hello everybody!

AI Note Cleanup is out for a random 20% of all users (paid and free) in public beta. Over the course of the week we should be able to release the beta to everybody.

Being a beta feature, there are some known issues, which we'll work on in the next few weeks. Please report any problem you encounter through the button that appears after you cleanup a note.

More info here: https://help.evernote.com/hc/articles/16280830963091

I'm also attaching my favorite example yet. Share yours if you want!

[Metrodon 2,184]

Initial feedback is that there should be a more obvious way of rejecting the changes rather than undo.

And maybe some feedback when a note can't be AI'd - why can't it be? That way I'll know not to try and use it with certain notes that don't meet the criteria.

[johansan 48]

Thanks for the update, but I do not like the following statement at all: "We may need to work with third-party providers [such as OpenAI] to better support certain features and functionalities like the processing of note content". This basically says that you are prepared to ship out my private corporate data to anonymous third-party providers without even informing me on who they are. OpenAI for example are very clear that they are not ready for business use yet since they will train their model on data sent to it and keep input data cached. 

Seriously, this could be a showstopper for Evernote in any serious corporation who wants to know exactly where their data end up.

[janndk 487]

Interesting new feature to play with, and could be very handy in some cases.

Seems to work quite well - but as all trimming happens at once, it can be difficult to see what actually has been changed. Maybe there should be some kind of step-by-step process, which shows what is happening, and also make it possible to approve/reject changes?

One of my notes (in danish) got translated to english. A bit surprising, but could be a useful feature too 😉

[agsteele 2,944]

52 minutes ago, johansan said:

This basically says that you are prepared to ship out my private corporate data to anonymous third-party providers without even informing me on who they are. OpenAI for example are very clear that they are not ready for business use yet since they will train their model on data sent to it and keep input data cached. 

Actually this tells you what is going to happen IF you choose to use the service. If you don't use the feature then your days will not be exchanged with anyone. You are in control the whole time.

[agsteele 2,944]

49 minutes ago, janndk said:

One of my notes (in danish) got translated to english. A bit surprising, but could be a useful feature too 

Interesting, I understood that the AI Cleanup would only work in English to start with.

[MichaelvT 18]

I had the same! My native language and therefore most notes are Dutch. But working in IT many words are in English. When using Ai clean up some notes partially switched from NL to English. Was a good translation though 🤣. 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

5 hours ago, johansan said:

Thanks for the update, but I do not like the following statement at all: "We may need to work with third-party providers [such as OpenAI] to better support certain features and functionalities like the processing of note content". This basically says that you are prepared to ship out my private corporate data to anonymous third-party providers without even informing me on who they are. OpenAI for example are very clear that they are not ready for business use yet since they will train their model on data sent to it and keep input data cached. 

Seriously, this could be a showstopper for Evernote in any serious corporation who wants to know exactly where their data end up.

Didn't I see an assurance somewhere recently that explicitly said our data WOULD NOT be retained by a 3rd-party provider like OpenAI for its training purposes?? Does this contradict that? I'm not in business, but I will absolutely not send my notes out to be gobbled up by OpenAI. Period. @Federico Simionato, I believe this deserves a clarification here.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

A couple of comments specific to my purposes as a solo creative worker (researcher/writer/scholar) in a sometimes esoteric specialty:

Quote

• Keep your notes neat and tidy. Automatically add formatting, rephrase incoherent sentences, and fix typos - all in an instant.

I have no incoherent sentences in my notes. Of course, sometimes there's a typo, which a robot might stumble over and fail to know how the sentence coheres. That doesn't mean the sentence, to a naturally intelligent reader, was incoherent. But as for typos, how good is this version of AI at technical terminology outside the tech and business world? The sentence "We occasionally find realized eschatology in the synoptics" is a meaningful one in my specialty. I am almost curious to see what AI would make of it. But probably not curious enough. "We occasionally find real zesty scatology in the synopsis" will not be regarded as a successful cleanup. And no, I will not feed my work into OpenAI to train it to get such things right. Or what about creative, imaginative, or poetic writing? Running AI over a few lines of Dylan Thomas, once again, almost but not quite makes me curious enough to try it.

Quote

Why was content added that was not originally in my note?

Sometimes, AI Note Cleanup might generate content that was not originally included in your note due to advanced language models used to analyze the context and meaning of the text. These models help the feature identify and correct errors, fill in missing information, and suggest improvements to enhance the overall clarity and coherence of your note....

Yeah, no. My notes include the information I have deemed necessary. Bloating them with extraneous matter I knew about and rejected would, again, not be what I would call cleanup.

Verdict without actually having tried it out: not merely unimpressed, but disimpressed.

[RgaDawg 35]

Well, one big piece of feedback, without even seeing it is that it MUST not tidy CODE. But, I think it has already been gone over and over that it will not do anything unless the feature is invoked on a note. I have lots of snippets and even detailed notes on technical stuff. I don't think anyone would want their technical notes or CODE that is saved for technical purposes 'cleaned up.' A recipe or meeting note is one thing, but SAVED technical details is quite another thing. Anyway, the feature will probably be a subscription based thing, so easy to opt out of that totally. GPT is quite cleaver and useful as a technical assistant, as long as I keep things very separate from what I am saving. I think all the panic about "AI Cleanup" is that it will do something without our permission & knowing, which has been covered already.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

Couple more thoughts:

(1) Can anyone summarize (heh) what happens to the recipe in Federico's video? It happens too fast and/or incoherently for me to catch.

(2)

Quote

Clean up notes

To get started, add content to a newly created note or open an existing note. Click or tap the AI Cleanup button (desktop) or the AI button (mobile) in the formatting toolbar of the note editor.

Evernote will generate a revised version of your note with added structure and improved clarity.....

Can I revert changes made by AI Note Cleanup?

Yes. You can click or tap the Undo button in the editing toolbar to reverse the last change or edit made to the note.

Additionally, customers with a paid Evernote subscription can view and/or export an older version of the note using note history.

The restored version can then be imported back into your account. Import does not overwrite or change the current version of the note.

So, if I understand this correctly, what AI cleanup does is to overwrite your note with the "cleaned up" version? And if you want to compare with the original, you have to (being a paying subscriber) find it in Note History? In a word, Yikes. IMHO, the AI cleanup should generate a new copy of the note, for comparison purposes, in case it's not, you know, 100% perfect since it's a !#$%&* beta. Or am I misunderstanding this?

[njlane 4]

I hit the feedback response too quickly and gave it a positive reaction to its action on my note.  ERROR. 

I pasted in a recipe - which is a substantial use case for me - and the AI cleanup did a lovely job of formatting. 

However, it also CHANGED THE DIRECTIONS, which would have resulted in an inedible mess had I followed them as it laid them out. 

AI can clean up what is pasted in, but if it decides to compress 10 steps to 6, change the time stated for cooking times, etc. then it's a fail. 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

1 hour ago, njlane said:

I hit the feedback response too quickly and gave it a positive reaction to its action on my note.  ERROR. 

I pasted in a recipe - which is a substantial use case for me - and the AI cleanup did a lovely job of formatting. 

However, it also CHANGED THE DIRECTIONS, which would have resulted in an inedible mess had I followed them as it laid them out. 

AI can clean up what is pasted in, but if it decides to compress 10 steps to 6, change the time stated for cooking times, etc. then it's a fail. 

Just what I'm concerned about. Perhaps it is good at producing generic summaries and formatted versions of generic materials, but anything with a specific, technical sense, not so much. Did it overwrite your original note, or make a new, "cleaned up" copy?

[njlane 4]

Overwrote, I believe.

 

I'll do a more careful test case to report it against the resulting note (I was trying to cook dinner so was more concerned with getting on with it), and to capture the precise variances between original unformatted paste-in and the AI cleansed version. 

 

 

[agsteele 2,944]

4 hours ago, njlane said:

I hit the feedback response too quickly and gave it a positive reaction to its action on my note.  ERROR. 

I pasted in a recipe - which is a substantial use case for me - and the AI cleanup did a lovely job of formatting. 

However, it also CHANGED THE DIRECTIONS, which would have resulted in an inedible mess had I followed them as it laid them out. 

AI can clean up what is pasted in, but if it decides to compress 10 steps to 6, change the time stated for cooking times, etc. then it's a fail. 

I'm no fan of AI at this stage. AS rather than AI - S = stupidity.

But, thankfully, I don't have to use it. It's there if I want it when it becomes a little more intelligent.

 

[Federico Simionato 1,021]

Answering some of the points raised for now:

• More obvious way of rejecting the changes rather than undo
  • Good point
• Better feedback when a note can't be cleaned up
  • We'll specify it better
  • For now, the button is disabled when the note is shorter than 100 characters, or longer than 6000 char. Plus, sometimes it might fail (especially on the most complex notes), in that case we might trigger an error.
• Privacy concerns - especially sending data to OpenAI and them using it for training
  • «Didn't I see an assurance somewhere recently that explicitly said our data WOULD NOT be retained by a 3rd-party provider like OpenAI for its training purposes?»
    Yes, we'll write this better. OpenAI does NOT retain any user data coming from Evernote, and of course does not use it for training models.
    Plus, if you don't use the feature, we don't send anything to them.
  • EDIT: it's clearly written in the supplemental terms: «We do not use Input or Output to train our artificial intelligence models or tools unless you direct us to do so.»
• Non-english notes getting translated into english
  • We're aware of this problem, we're trying to fix it
  • EDIT: a fix is out now, please let me know if it works better
• Processing code
  • AI Note Cleanup does not process the content of codeblocks
• Comparing old version and cleaned up version:
  • The way I do it for now while it's in beta is hitting undo and redo, while we wait for a better UX
  • On creating a duplicate of the note with the cleaned up version: the vast majority of people we talked with preferred not having a duplicate note, we'll leave it as it is.
• Changing the content, from slightly to heavily
  • In theory it should only do this slightly. If it changes big chunks it's a bug, please report it.

A general comment:

AI Note Cleanup was not built to improve ALL notes. It does wonders on notes that are taken in a hurry that have typos, wrong capitalization, unformatted lists, wrong punctuation... But if you worked a lot on a note to make it pristine, it won't know what to do, or it might even ruin it. It's not supposed to be used on every note, it's like using codeblocks: I would expect a huge amount of notes NOT to use codeblocks.

[Jon/t 1,282]

If anyone's interested I interviewed Federico for my productivity podcast yesterday and its live now.... thanks for you time!

We spent a bit of time digging into Ai Note Cleanup which might help folks understand it a bit more... also other things to talk about.

https://tamingthetrunk.substack.com/p/exclusive-interview-with-evernote#details

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

6 hours ago, Federico Simionato said:

AI Note Cleanup was not built to improve ALL notes. It does wonders on notes that are taken in a hurry that have typos, wrong capitalization, unformatted lists, wrong punctuation... But if you worked a lot on a note to make it pristine, it won't know what to do, or it might even ruin it. It's not supposed to be used on every note, it's like using codeblocks: I would expect a huge amount of notes NOT to use codeblocks.

Yes, this was the conclusion I was coming to (not having access to the beta yet). Therefore much of what I posted earlier may be irrelevant. For such limited purposes, it may be useful. Yet even when I have such notes (for instance after consulting with a financial or medical advisor; I am fortunate not to have to do work meetings anymore), I would be very cautious about relying on AI to clean them up without checking. That's why I would be in the minority who would much prefer that the AI process create a duplicate of the note with the cleaned up version, especially in the beta stage. Until I absolutely know that it is trustworthy, I want to verify it by comparing with the original. If and when I do try it, I will create a duplicate note first and let AI process that, then compare with the original. Thank you, @Federico Simionato, for posting these helpful clarifications.

[Danni P. 22]

10 hours ago, Federico Simionato said:

Comparing old version and cleaned up version:

• The way I do it for now while it's in beta is hitting undo and redo, while we wait for a better UX
• On creating a duplicate of the note with the cleaned up version: the vast majority of people we talked with preferred not having a duplicate note, we'll leave it as it is.

 

Just an idea; why not prompt the user with some choices when hitting the AI Cleanup?

i.e. 1) Overwrite 2) Create duplicate 3) Insert Cleanup version at the top of the note..  

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

5 minutes ago, Danni P. said:

Just an idea; why not prompt the user with some choices when hitting the AI Cleanup?

i.e. 1) Overwrite 2) Create duplicate 3) Insert Cleanup version at the top of the note..  

+1. This would make me more likely to try it out.

[Mishkafofer 26]

Well, the video example from above looks like some kind of clipped website.

I would rather have AI assist in doing proper clipping than editing. In clipping we already dealing with public data so no harm to privacy.

[Alxa 479]

20 hours ago, Federico Simionato said:

• Privacy concerns - especially sending data to OpenAI and them using it for training
  • «Didn't I see an assurance somewhere recently that explicitly said our data WOULD NOT be retained by a 3rd-party provider like OpenAI for its training purposes?»
    Yes, we'll write this better. OpenAI does NOT retain any user data coming from Evernote, and of course does not use it for training models.
    Plus, if you don't use the feature, we don't send anything to them.
  • EDIT: it's clearly written in the supplemental terms: «We do not use Input or Output to train our artificial intelligence models or tools unless you direct us to do so.»

 

@Federico SimionatoI read the supplemental terms and it does not make clear, if my note content is sent to an external service for AI processing or not. Does the AI engine run on Evernote's servers, under Evernote's control or is it some (which) external service? In your posting it sounds like you sent information abroad. Without certainty I will likely not use AI features at all.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

It is very clearly posted, already in the info box when you try the feature:

The note IS send to OpenAI for processing, and returned.

The note IS NOT stored at OpenAI, or used for anything else than conversion. Especially not for training the AI.

If you use it or not is entirely up to yourself.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

9 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

It is very clearly posted, already in the info box when you try the feature:

The note IS send to OpenAI for processing, and returned.

The note IS NOT stored at OpenAI, or used for anything else than conversion. Especially not for training the AI.

If you use it or not is entirely up to yourself.

Of course, this depends on the honesty and integrity of OpenAI. I don't use it and don't know if it's trustworthy or not. I do recall that its CEO recently went before Congress and asked them to stop him and his AI colleagues from doing harm, so....

[Jean-Christophe 25]

Some feedback about AI cleaning being tested for a couple of days.

Not all my notes can be cleaned, AI button being inactive without further notice (format ? Content ? Other ?) for most of the notes.

When available, AI cleaning is slow, even for a short note, most of the time I can do the same at the same speed when it is about basic formatting.

Some notes were nicely cleaned, with spaces, blank lines, etc. removed. But in general there is a minor difference, not so much reformatting.

I would appreciate options like "What do you want to clean : formatting, syntax, colors, ... ?) as right now I do not know what will happen, I can only see the result.

Bulk cleaning would be an option too, selecting multiple notes then click on "clean all".

AI cleaning seems to use a lot of bullet points when formatting entries, maybe because I have short sentences ? But after cleaning, 90% of my note is made of bullet points that I need to remove. As I cannot do partial "undo" I need to change formatting manually, this is not convenient.

Then, sending my private content to an external server is a major concern, I do not want private notes being sent through the web to AI xyz and being sent back. Local processing is mandatory to me when dealing with emails, private projects, new products, etc.

Until now and based on this very first release, I will not use AI cleaning but will evaluate any new feature on a subset of my notes, as part of my understanding of the proposed features.

My 2 (cleaned) cents.

[bwydoogh 71]

4 minutes ago, Jean-Christophe said:

I would appreciate options like "What do you want to clean : formatting, syntax, colors, ... ?) as right now I do not know what will happen, I can only see the result.

I'd like to see a dropdown next to the AI button with options like you suggest, plus others like "Summarize," "Fix Spelling and Grammar," and "Explain." Not just one "magic" button. Are there plans to refine this?

[Jean-Christophe 25]

Correct, would be nice, including "translate to ..." french in my case.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

Don‘t know which OS you use. For me translation is just a right mouseclick away, in all apps (Mac & iOS).

No need for an AI tool to perform this miracle.

[Federico Simionato 1,021]

Update: the AI Note Cleanup BETA is now out for all users.

Some fixes and small improvements are already out (server side), others are coming soon through a client update.

Keep your suggestions coming, I am reading everything personally.

[cyberry 35]

Some first thoughts on AI Note Cleanup:

The AINC button appeared in my notes yesterday morning. When one clicks, one gets the disclaimer about the beta, including that note information would be shared with a third party. That prospect doesn't bother me for most of the notes I create, but your mileage may vary. And, as others have pointed out, the feature is totally "opt in" - AINC gets applied only to individual notes when user requests it.

A short note took about 10 seconds to run through AINC; a medium note (950 characters) about 25 seconds; a longer note (3500 characters) was significantly longer - maybe close to a minute. I can see why, at least in beta, the feature is limited to notes up to 6000 characters. 

In my medium note, AINC accurately fixed misspellings of "university-wde" (should be "wide"), sumerr ("summer") and tmrw (tomorrow). That last spelling was intentional - that's how I usually write "tomorrow" in my notes. That correction made me think that it would be nice if there were a text expander feature built into AINC, customizable by each user. For instance, i could set the feature so that when I type ACO, AINC automatically changes that to "Acme Insurance Company". 

As promoted, AINC seems to be intended especially for notes of a meeting. I think the feature can work really well there, but I can understand why it might not work so well on recipes and other lists of instructions. 

I was a bit disappointed that AINC didn't do more with spiffying up the formatting of the notes. The notes I have tried it on have all being ones I created using the "Meeting Note" template, so they are already pretty structured. I'll see what happens when I run AINC on a less structured note (e.g. notes that I write to myself to record information relevant to a particular project.)

To the extent AINC is used on meeting notes, I don't mind that there isn't a "compare" function, since if I took the notes and was at the meeting, I know what did and didn't happen and can tweak the post-AINC note accordingly. But if it is intended to be a feature with a broader use, it would be important to be able to identify the changes that AINC made. 

[Jean-Christophe 25]

3 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Don‘t know which OS you use. For me translation is just a right mouseclick away, in all apps (Mac & iOS).

No need for an AI tool to perform this miracle.

excuse me for using Windows together with iOS

[Jean-Christophe 25]

2 hours ago, Federico Simionato said:

Update: the AI Note Cleanup BETA is now out for all users.

Some fixes and small improvements are already out (server side), others are coming soon through a client update.

Keep your suggestions coming, I am reading everything personally.

Nice, and thanks for the feedback here.
Any reason why some notes can be cleaned and some not ?

[Jon/t 1,282]

50 minutes ago, Jean-Christophe said:

Any reason why some notes can be cleaned and some not ?

Cleanup works on notes between 100 and 6000 characters. Check the length of your notes but it should work on notes within this range.

[s2sailor 2,187]

I think ai note cleanup could be useful in some situations, but after trying it a few times I don’t plan on using it again, at least in its current implementation.  As others have said, one cannot clearly tell what has changed.  You press a button and poof you have a new note.  Unless I spend time studying the before and after versions of the note you can’t tell if the accuracy of the note has been maintained.  Writing can have shades of meaning and the ai will make its best attempt but, guaranteed, will not always get it right, which, whether a recipe or a business planning note, if wrong, could be disastrous.

 Bouncing between undo and redo to see the changes is unrealistic.  I also think creating a separate new note is not helpful because you still need to bounce between notes and study both to see what has changed.  For me to use ai note cleanup, I need to see my original note along with the proposed changes “within the same note.”  Only then can I see and compare what has been done and feel comfortable accepting any changes. Ideally we should be able to accept some changes and discard others, or accept all or discard all.  

I find it interesting that BS led off with this instead of search ai.  With search ai, if the ai results aren’t helpful you resort to the other search methods, no harm done.  With ai note cleanup you are changing the note content which is a lot trickier and the barrier for customer acceptance and usage is much higher due to the accuracy concerns … my 2 cents.

[daijok 0]

On 5/26/2023 at 3:37 AM, Federico Simionato said:

Update: the AI Note Cleanup BETA is now out for all users.

Some fixes and small improvements are already out (server side), others are coming soon through a client update.

Keep your suggestions coming, I am reading everything personally.

I'd like to cleanup the news articles that's getting sent to my Evernote. I can't find how it's being sent. 

[PaperQueen 50]

Please give us an opt-out on AI use.

This morning alone, I needed to make quick edits to three notes (and by “quick,” I mean I’m standing at the boarding gate and don’t have time to fiddle around). Instead of typing, tapping the green checkmark to confirm, then moving along, I had to wait…and wait…and wait…and wait…while the AI icon fluttered for a minute or longer after each edit.

Each. Edit. On. Each. Note. 

The app was frozen in place, waiting for AI to do its thing. Couldn’t tap the green checkmark. Couldn’t navigate out of the note. Only option was to quit the app and relaunch, which—of course—meant circling back to each note to confirm the edits were saved. 

This is not workable. 

[PaperQueen 50]

On 5/26/2023 at 10:50 AM, cyberry said:

And, as others have pointed out, the feature is totally "opt in" - AINC gets applied only to individual notes when user requests it.

Sadly, this isn’t accurate. I have not opted in, yet this morning, was surprised to find AI fluttering away in the toolbar every time I made an edit (then locking up the screen for a minute or longer). See my earlier post for details.

[agsteele 2,944]

The AI option sits on the tool bar but it is entirely inactive unless you click the icon and accept the process.

You may be experiencing other issues causing the problems you described.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

There is no general opt in.

The opt in is per note. Don’t hit the AI button, and AI is not used.

If the AI button is fluttering, it looks like a bad install. No further advise possible since you don’t tell which platform and client.

[raojenkins 10]

Would prefer AI button on far right of toolbar; currently my dropdown for formatting is far-too-often invisible because the AI beta button takes up too much room in toolbar. 

Bug? Also, about the same time "AI cleanup" appeared, I started losing random chunks -- big chunks -- of edits to some notes (usually new notes), for no reason. Working on DESKTOP, not in cloud. Maybe correlation, not causation, but it is enraging, as it means I can't trust anything I type to Evernote to STAY in Evernote, thus defeating whole purpose of app and negating the "Ever." Please fix.

I have used AI Note cleanup exactly once, by accident. No way to tell up front that AI is doing just the one note. No way to tell what was changed. In my case, it flattened a hierarchy I had carefully formatted into a 1-level bullet list. Immediately undid. With no way to tell what was changed, is unlikely I will ever use.

Evernote Professional for desktop, MacBook Air 2020, M1 chip, latest version of Mac OS Ventura.

[janndk 487]

Seems that "AI-cleaned" notes are not saved at the moment? When opening a "cleaned" note again, all changes are gone. This happens both in Windows and android app. 🤔

[s2sailor 2,187]

19 minutes ago, raojenkins said:

Would prefer AI button on far right of toolbar; currently my dropdown for formatting is far-too-often invisible because the AI beta button takes up too much room in toolbar. 

Bug? Also, about the same time "AI cleanup" appeared, I started losing random chunks -- big chunks -- of edits to some notes (usually new notes), for no reason. Working on DESKTOP, not in cloud. Maybe correlation, not causation, but it is enraging, as it means I can't trust anything I type to Evernote to STAY in Evernote, thus defeating whole purpose of app and negating the "Ever." Please fix.

I have used AI Note cleanup exactly once, by accident. No way to tell up front that AI is doing just the one note. No way to tell what was changed. In my case, it flattened a hierarchy I had carefully formatted into a 1-level bullet list. Immediately undid. With no way to tell what was changed, is unlikely I will ever use.

Evernote Professional for desktop, MacBook Air 2020, M1 chip, latest version of Mac OS Ventura.

Others have complained about the location of the AI button and I agree.  They are promoting the feature so I understand why they put it where they did, but for those of us that don't want to use it, it would be nice to be able to move it to the far right.  

As others have said AI cleanup is inactive (does nothing) unless you click on the button and then it only activates on that one note which you can then undo if done accidentally or you don't like the results.  I'm not sure what is happening about you losing random data.  I don't see how it could be related to the new AI function, but it might be related to the new sync mechanism.  I would suggest entering a help ticket for that.

[janndk 487]

AI clean up is sometimes removing web links from the notes. There might be situations where this would be a good thing, but in my case the links were an essential part of the note. No harm done though, as I'm just testing the tool.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

I doubt this AI really knows what’s an integral part of the note, and what’s not. 

This will be a subscribers feature after the trial, and if just because you need access to note history to clean up the clean up, case cleaning up was too clean.

[eric99 980]

12 hours ago, janndk said:

AI clean up is sometimes removing web links from the notes. There might be situations where this would be a good thing, but in my case the links were an essential part of the note. No harm done though, as I'm just testing the tool.

Yes, it should be a stylistic cleanup only. As long as AI knows nothing about semantics, content should never be removed.

I believe more in non-destructive AI assistance, such as AI search in unstructured databases. That will make a huge difference, especially for users who are not the author of the database.

 

[RgaDawg 35]

On 5/23/2023 at 9:02 PM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

.. the AI cleanup should generate a new copy of the note, for comparison purposes..

I think the thinking that it doesn't generate a new copy is that there would be way too many notes to sort through .. So, the way it is, you can copy a note to play with, or you can decide if you want to keep it or not.. UNDO. Anyway, it's eventually going to be an add on subscription service that many of us will simply choose not to purchase

[PinkElephant 8,094]

It converts the note which is send to the AI server. The prior status can be restored through note history. Since note history is a subscribers feature, currently Free users trying it should make a duplicate of the original note, not to loose content.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

20 minutes ago, RgaDawg said:

I think the thinking that it doesn't generate a new copy is that there would be way too many notes to sort through .. So, the way it is, you can copy a note to play with, or you can decide if you want to keep it or not.. UNDO. Anyway, it's eventually going to be an add on subscription service that many of us will simply choose not to purchase

I'm not sure if it's possible to do AI cleanup in bulk at this point, so in doing one note at a time it seems reasonable to want to compare the output with the input, esp. while it's still in beta. Undo <> Redo a half dozen times sounds like more hassle than an extra note. IAC, either the original or the cleaned up version will get deleted quickly. No way I'm going to click the button and think, "There, that's that, what could go wrong?" But that's just how I work, and I realize that there are lots of different approaches.

[RgaDawg 35]

5 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I'm not sure if it's possible to do AI cleanup in bulk at this point

Well, what I meant was that if AI makes a copy everytime it is invoked, over time, once ends up with tons of notes referencing that same things. I guess once AI copies a note, one could always decide to keep one or the other .. hence, lessening the overabundance of similar notes

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

14 minutes ago, RgaDawg said:

Well, what I meant was that if AI makes a copy everytime it is invoked, over time, once ends up with tons of notes referencing that same things. I guess once AI copies a note, one could always decide to keep one or the other .. hence, lessening the overabundance of similar notes

Yes, I guess if you run AI cleanup on several notes at the end of a day of meetings, at that point you just want to go home and not review them all. Do that over the course of a week, and you do get a pile of unnecessary notes if it's duplicating them. And if it's just overwriting, you get a pile of what a beta robot thinks you ought to have written, and only Note History (if you're paying) to find out what you actually wrote. Honestly, I'm not sure I see either one of those as a great option.

[l0nEr 7]

So far, only noticed adjustments in styles. didnt notice any changes in content besides grammer mistakes, or lengthening of some 'short-forms' (e.g. coz becomes because). AI Cleanup loves to delete my empty paragraphings...

AI Clean up doesnt seem to do anything to notes that are already written nicely in prose form, e.g. those copied from a blogpost.

6000 word limit too short? 

How about one that highlights the key points of a note. 'summaries'

 

Not entirely that useful. Cant imagine using this feature often.

Will we be able to get something like Notion, turning the note into prose form?

When will AI Search be introduce too?

[anfang 35]

I find AI Clean Up useful, but rarely would I need it to run on the entire note.

Rather, selective sections probably warrant a cleanup. If I could select the specific portions of text that I want to cleanup, that would be great.

It would also overcome the "Note too large" problem that currently constraints AI Clean Up

[ied 1]

I have enjoyed using the AI Clean Up, but there is another bug in the app.  When I have created a task within a note, the words in the task will disappear when I attempt to include a day and time.  As a result, I have to type the task again.  This has happend twice in the last two days.  I believe this is a bug that needs to be addressed.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

Thanks for the feedback. This is a user forum, not the place to report bugs.

Contact support.

[PaperQueen 50]

On 5/27/2023 at 12:38 PM, PinkElephant said:

If the AI button is fluttering, it looks like a bad install. No further advise possible since you don’t tell which platform and client.

My bad—am on an iPhone Pro (iOS 16.4.1) using Evernote 10.51.

It does, indeed, appear to be a bad install. I recorded a few seconds of the AI flutter (a.k.a. Help, I’m Trapped In A Note and Can’t Get Out) about one minute into another two-plus minute “lock up” on a different note. 

[cswilly 41]

I would use AI Clean-up more often if it worked on only the part of the note I selected. I would use this when I add new text to notes that are logs or daily dairies. 

[this is YY 1]

How do we opt OUT of the AI Clean-up beta? I was intruigued and accepted it, and then immediately the ENTIRE CONTENTS OF MY NOTE WAS DELETED.

I need to turn this off entirely. Way too risky. I pay for a really rely on Evernote. This kind of bug is totally unacceptable.

Let me know how to get out of this beta. Thanks.

[Spark E 1]

I'm glad that the AI assist is optional (at this point), but this feels like a slippery slope toward feature creep. 
I want my notes to be MY notes and I especially don't want AI anywhere near them. 
I'm an IT Specialist, not some Luddite, but I and my company are moving away from software products that incorporate AI due to ethical, security and privacy concerns. 
I will eventually migrate my data over to my own servers soon as Cloud services have too many vulnerabilities.
I'll probably leave web snippets on Evernote, but nothing that I have written myself.
 

[PinkElephant 8,094]

You decide for which note you click at the AI button.

No click, no AI. It is strictly on demand.

About moving everything to your own server: Maybe it is in todays environment a larger risk to defend your own network (at least if you want access from everywhere) than to move it into a professional cloud service. EN cloud is running on servers rented in Google data centers, with mirrored sites. A private network needs to go very far to get close to this level of security.

[MvdH 400]

On 5/27/2023 at 3:42 PM, s2sailor said:

I find it interesting that BS led off with this instead of search ai.  With search ai, if the ai results aren’t helpful you resort to the other search methods, no harm done.  With ai note cleanup you are changing the note content which is a lot trickier and the barrier for customer acceptance and usage is much higher due to the accuracy concerns … my 2 cents.

AI search will require your whole database being indexed/learned by AI I assume. That is a lot of conversion/storage/CPU serverside if my assumption is correct. Cleaning up a single note like right now, doesn't need all this training of the AI. It's a simple request like talking to Chat GPT itself with a single question and sending a single note over (which is basically what they are doing). That makes it logical doing the clean-up thing first.

[s2sailor 2,187]

7 hours ago, MvdH said:

AI search will require your whole database being indexed/learned by AI I assume. That is a lot of conversion/storage/CPU serverside if my assumption is correct. Cleaning up a single note like right now, doesn't need all this training of the AI. It's a simple request like talking to Chat GPT itself with a single question and sending a single note over (which is basically what they are doing). That makes it logical doing the clean-up thing first.

Good point.  That makes sense and if done by a third party will make ai search a non-starter for me.

[Spark E 1]

19 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

About moving everything to your own server: Maybe it is in todays environment a larger risk to defend your own network (at least if you want access from everywhere) than to move it into a professional cloud service

This is true and good advice, I should have put a disclaimer "Don't try this at home".
I'm in a unique situation in that I have my own datacenter, used to run a colocation / hosting company and have the necessary experience. 
Also, I'm a bit of a control freak. Ok, ok... I am a HUGE control freak. 

[PinkElephant 8,094]

In case of EN, even if you were somehow able to make it connect to a local database, you would be in for a surprise: Many features rely on the server backend. It’s not just some disk space rented somewhere.

[Spark E 1]

9 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

In case of EN, even if you were somehow able to make it connect to a local database

Currently, I use the notes app on my phone to jot down my personal thoughts and ideas because the EN app is too cumbersome for "quick, before I forget" moments. I then occasionally copy them from my phone to EN later for long term storage.
Going forward I will just write a web based client to store them in a database on one of my servers. 
I'll still use EN for the Web-Clipper (which is brilliant) as those kind of notes aren't personal or private (for me) and I'm not about to try and reinvent THAT wheel. 

I'm not ignoring what you mentioned earlier about the AI only being active when you click the button. I think that is good. However, I see the feature as an avenue for privacy issues in the future. Either due to someone accidentally hitting the AI button or a coding error on the dev side or policy changes to increase shareholder value. Especially with the current zeitgeist of trying to shoe-horn AI into everything imaginable these days as a selling point, before we have regulations and studies to analyze the irreversible harm that it can do. Facebook started 20 years ago and it's only in the past few years that society in general is taking notice of the psychological harm it has caused and that it will never be held fully accountable for. AI is in a position to potentially cause much more harm, much faster. 

[Craig Stevens 0]

On 5/24/2023 at 6:49 AM, Federico Simionato said:

Answering some of the points raised for now:

• More obvious way of rejecting the changes rather than undo
  • Good point
• Better feedback when a note can't be cleaned up
  • We'll specify it better
  • For now, the button is disabled when the note is shorter than 100 characters, or longer than 6000 char. Plus, sometimes it might fail (especially on the most complex notes), in that case we might trigger an error.
• Privacy concerns - especially sending data to OpenAI and them using it for training
  • «Didn't I see an assurance somewhere recently that explicitly said our data WOULD NOT be retained by a 3rd-party provider like OpenAI for its training purposes?»
    Yes, we'll write this better. OpenAI does NOT retain any user data coming from Evernote, and of course does not use it for training models.
    Plus, if you don't use the feature, we don't send anything to them.
  • EDIT: it's clearly written in the supplemental terms: «We do not use Input or Output to train our artificial intelligence models or tools unless you direct us to do so.»
• Non-english notes getting translated into english
  • We're aware of this problem, we're trying to fix it
  • EDIT: a fix is out now, please let me know if it works better
• Processing code
  • AI Note Cleanup does not process the content of codeblocks
• Comparing old version and cleaned up version:
  • The way I do it for now while it's in beta is hitting undo and redo, while we wait for a better UX
  • On creating a duplicate of the note with the cleaned up version: the vast majority of people we talked with preferred not having a duplicate note, we'll leave it as it is.
• Changing the content, from slightly to heavily
  • In theory it should only do this slightly. If it changes big chunks it's a bug, please report it.

A general comment:

AI Note Cleanup was not built to improve ALL notes. It does wonders on notes that are taken in a hurry that have typos, wrong capitalization, unformatted lists, wrong punctuation... But if you worked a lot on a note to make it pristine, it won't know what to do, or it might even ruin it. It's not supposed to be used on every note, it's like using codeblocks: I would expect a huge amount of notes NOT to use codeblocks.

Is there a way to shut it off? I turned on AI cleanup for a large To Do list. It basically deleted everything. When I reverted back to the old list, it continued to delete everything again in a few hours. It may have been over 6000 characters which I didn't realize would be an issue initially.

[MvdH 400]

11 hours ago, Craig Stevens said:

Is there a way to shut it off? I turned on AI cleanup for a large To Do list. It basically deleted everything. When I reverted back to the old list, it continued to delete everything again in a few hours. It may have been over 6000 characters which I didn't realize would be an issue initially.

I think you had the unfortunate honour to encounter a certain known bug, where edits/changes get lost and notes revert to an older version. The AI clean-up is not a "switch", but instead it is a one-off action only triggered by actively pressing the button as a user.

I believe you did the AI clean-up. Reverted to the orginal version. Then that bug of loosing changes kicked in and reverted back to the 'cleaned up' version. Two seperate processes/actions that has nothing to do with the AI functionality.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

Good catch, @MvdH. If it persists, simplest thing might be to get the note as you wish it, then copy its content to a new note before it can revert to the cleaned-up/wrecked version. You'll lose the Note History but obviously that's not doing you any good at the moment.

[Dave Edwards 244]

A number of months ago Evernote ventured into the world of artificial intelligence when it introduced AI Cleanup. Now that I've been using it for some time, I want to share my review:

https://daveedwardsmedia.com/2023/08/21/my-impressions-of-evernotes-ai-cleanup-tool/