AI versus Marshy - You Get a Clone, I Get a Clone, and Everyone Gets a Clone

Welcome to this article about personal knowledge management and AI-powered tools. I’m Marshy, and I’m excited to share with you some of the latest trends and innovations in this space. If you’re new here, don’t worry - you can still follow along and learn about the fascinating world of AI and knowledge management. Let’s dive in! Ever since discovering Evernote (notes app) and reading about the pensieve tool in the Harry Potter books, I’ve fantasised about a technology equivalent. In the books, the tool allowed you to draw memories from your mind, and place them into a bowl for viewing and remembering later. Since then, a trend has emerged called personal knowledge management . It’s the practice of managing your thoughts, saved articles, clippings, and other digital tidbits and using them in a way that helps you think better. One of the most popular thought leaders in this niche is Tiago Forte. He’s quite active on Twitter and Youtube and sells an expensive course called Building a Second Brain. I can’t recommend the course but I did read his audiobook, and I apply a big chunk of his lessons in my own system (Notes into Craft, and saving articles with Readwise). A crash-course on PARA can be found here - which formulates the bones of the system. It stands for Projects, Areas of Interest, Resources, Archive. ​ ​ The capabilities are immense and it can take systems like this and blow them up like rocket fuel. A lot of the “knowledge management apps” already integrate things things AI assistants into their apps. The GIF below shows me taking the excerpt of a consulting specialisation guide I read, and summarising it into three steps that I can take today - intriguing right? Yeah but what’s the TL;DR? Another direction that’s far stranger is cloning. This is the practice of taking a person’s words, videos, podcast interviews etc. and feeding it into a Language Learning Model (LLM) to create an electronc version that can answer your questions. From a marketing perspective, the positioning for these emerging tools is wild: ​ Delphi - let’s you talk to your favourite expert (living or dead) ​ Yeah but what would Dead Jobs say about AI? ​ Coachvox - pitches to expensive coaches and offers to clone them to help sell their services ​ Momento AI - offers to clone whomever you want The utility of these tools at this point of time is debatable. But think about how wisdom actually works. It’s educated decisions based on previous experiences. If AI can “absorb” previous recollected experiences and is getting exponentially better at it over time - how much wisdom will it collectively then have? 🤯 Can you see why I started a newsletter for this stuff? Tool of the week: Adobe Express and making memory bowls Last week I played with Adobe’s Generative Fill tool and let’s just say professional graphic designers haven’t got much to worry about yet. ​ Adobe Express is another beta that’s free for now and has quite a lot of useful features that you can also find in the paid version of Canva. If you’ve been put off by some of the technical-looking applications of AI tools right now then this one is for you. It offers text-to-image and remove background out of the box and so you can have a play simply by registering a free Adobe account. Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy #4: Cloning, Express text to image, + another great book use case