AI doesn’t wait anymore

"Let's build an ai avatar. Do some research.sparked from the Galaxy Brain podcast episode about AI influencers."

I was walking to work the other day, listening to a podcast that discussed creating synthetic influencers that appeared in videos posted to social media. I wanted to look into it and see if I could create one, so I opened the Notion app to add a note to my running list of ideas. The above message is what I entered, complete with typos and no further context. Only instead of typing it into my list, I accidentally entered that into the Notion AI prompt field.

Notion AI found the podcast: Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel's show, the episode with NYT reporter Tiffany Hsu on synthetic influencers and reality fatigue. It reviewed the transcript, saw that the episode doesn’t actually go into detail about creating these things (I hadn’t finished the podcast at the time), then pivoted to online research, returning with a structured, three-tier build plan: tools, workflow, ethical considerations, and disclosure risks. It had extrapolated from my note my actual intent. It did all of this in moments, it did it for free, and it did it without me intending to invoke AI and set it on this task.

AI is getting more powerful, capable of doing more things every day. But that’s not what struck me about this interaction. The trigger is changing. I didn’t (intend to) invoke AI. It showed up and did real work, intuiting my intention.

We're moving from AI as something you deliberately use to AI as something that meets you before you decide to use it. This feels like a big shift. It will impact how we work, how we design products. It changes what “using AI” means. I am excited about this shift.

NotionAI’s response