This isn’t the first time I have considered how Artificial Intelligence interacts with my Personal Knowledge Management system. However, this time, I am going deeper as I consider how my Zettelkasten and the knowledge base it contains interact with Artificial Intelligence.
In this blog post, I will share my journey of incorporating Artificial Intelligence within my Personal Knowledge Management system and how I use it with my Zettelkasten.
What is a Zettelkasten?
A Zettelkasten is a way to organise your own thoughts and those of others. Each idea should have its own note, which can be linked with other related notes to create a web of ideas. I have written a lot of content on Zettelkasten, and for those looking to start their own Zettelkasten, I would recommend reading our introductory guide.
Integrating tools: Integrating my Zettelkasten with AI
I use Obsidian to manage my Zettelkasten, as it supports the use of backlinks, which are essential to a Zettelkasten. Obsidian also supports folders and tags, allowing the creation of a minimal structure for my Zettelkasten. This allows me to store my literature notes and permanent notes in two separate folders.
Tags are used to define the categories that a specific note covers. Being a Zettelkasten, it is likely that a single permanent note could relate to one or more topics. Tags help to structure notes that relate to a specific category.
Obsidian has an active community that develops a wide variety of community plugins, including plugins that allow you to use a large language model within Obsidian itself.
In the past year, I have used two different community plugins. I started with Smart Connections before switching to Obsidian Copilot. You can find out why I switched in another blog post in this linked blog post.
The benefits of combining Artificial Intelligence with my Zettelkasten
In this section, I want to explore the benefits I have found using a large language model in my Obsidian vault, which enables the Large Language Model to access the notes contained within my vault.
I have decided to limit my Obsidian co-pilot plugin to my Zettelkasten and literature notes, which are awaiting final processing and the creation of permanent notes.
I also allow it to access my journal, which includes some notes on my thoughts and potentially the context of those thoughts.
I like the fact that I can talk to my Zettelkasten, ask questions, and get summaries of what I know. This ability has helped me to create some blog posts, including this very one.
While I urge you to consider how your permanent notes link together, especially when adding new permanent notes to your vault, it is still helpful to have an AI that advises you of what notes it considers relevant to the note you are working on.
Potential downsides of combining Artificial Intelligence with my Zettelkasten
My biggest concern about using Artificial Intelligence with my Zettelkasten is that it will impact my ability to learn. One of the main reasons for having a Zettelkasten is to help me learn new things by linking my own ideas and thoughts with the ideas and thoughts of others.
To allow them to form links in my second brain to help encourage mental pathways to form between those same ideas in my mind. After all the linking of the ideas seats at the core of how humans learn.
But it goes deeper than that. To learn effectively as an adult, you have to ask questions about the information you are accessing and think critically.
I’m afraid the use of Artificial Intelligence will negatively impact this, undermining the very reasons why I’m doing this in the first place.
Conclusion
I think that generative Artificial Intelligence, like Large Language Models, has the potential to leverage human abilities, and that includes your own Personal Knowledge Management system. To do that, I have to be in control of when I learn while using Artificial Intelligence to ask my Zettelkasten to ask it questions.
Keeping a Zettelkasten requires some friction, which helps you learn and form those precious links between ideas. The AI can assist me by pinpointing the odd one I might miss, but it must always be me who drives it.
Further reading and useful links
What is a Zettelkasten?
Creating a Zettelkasten in Obsidian
Is using an AI with a Personal Knowledge Management System a good idea?
Obsidian Review
Obsidian section of our website
Zettelkasten section of our website