Why delegating Scetchnotes to AI is a bad idea

I’ve seen more and more AI-generated images that look like sketchnotes, and I understand the desire to create them.

Sketchnotes work partly because they condense complex information into images. But a sketchnote is more than an image that looks a certain way.

Sketchnoting is a personal practice where a person listens, understands, processes, and visualizes their thinking. Sketchnoters do this work to understand it first for themselves, and if others get value from it, bonus.

Professionals who sketchnote at conferences or in group meetings to help other people understand, do the thinking work themselves, too.

Here’s why AI-generated, sketchnote-style images are not sketchnotes:

When a transcript or a block of text is dropped into an AI with a prompt to make it look like a sketchnote, the work, thinking, and internal dot-connecting (the heart of a sketchnote) are lost to the machine. Even worse, your skills in these areas begin to atrophy from disuse:

You did not listen.
You did no processing.
You did no synthesis.
You did not connect the dots.
You did no sketching or noting.
You’ve created a simulation of a sketchnote.

When you delegate the hard part of a sketchnote to the AI, you’re bypassing the purpose of sketchnotes: the work of listening, processing, thinking, synthesizing, sketching, and noting the idea into a sketchnote.

A sketchnote may be rough or finely polished, but its purpose is the same: to build your understanding, to reveal your thinking, and to reward you with a visual artifact for reference or sharing. You’re building knowledge as you visualize ideas.

Call an AI-simulated image an infographic, an illustration, or a visual. Just don’t call it a sketchnote, because you didn’t do the work!

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Why delegating Scetchnotes to AI is a bad idea