Until recently, ChatGPT could help me think and write, but it could not see the large body of material I had accumulated elsewhere. It knew nothing about my Evernote archive of more than 27,000 notes, ideas, quotations, articles and fragments of thinking that I had collected or written over the last 12 years. Nor could it access the files on my computer or the transcripts of my Zoom conversations unless I manually copied the material into the conversation.
That is beginning to change through something called the Model Context Protocol
, or MCP.
MCP is an open standard that allows an AI application to connect to external sources of information and to other tools. It has been described as rather like USB-C: instead of creating a different kind of connection for every application, MCP provides a common way for them to communicate.
MCP is not limited to ChatGPT. It is also supported by Claude and by a growing number of other applications, including development tools such as Visual Studio Code and Cursor.
In ChatGPT, many of these connections are becoming available through plugins. There are already quite a few that can be selected from a directory. In many cases, installing one is little more than choosing the plugin, connecting the relevant account and deciding what permissions to give it.
I have been experimenting with connections to Evernote, my Zoom transcripts and files on my Windows computer. ChatGPT can also search my Conversational Leadership website directly, although that particular access does not currently use MCP.
The combination is powerful. I can ask questions such as:
What have I already written about this?
What old notes might strengthen this idea?
Where does something I wrote years ago conflict with what I think today?
Which ideas have I collected but never developed?*
ChatGPT can search across the material, find connections I had missed, compare ideas and help me develop them. It is already changing the way I read, think and write because so much more of the work can take place within a single conversation.
For now, I am being cautious. I am allowing ChatGPT to read my material, but not to change or delete anything. Once I am confident that everything is stable and that I understand the safeguards, I may allow it to write as well.
Even with read-only access, however, the difference is substantial. ChatGPT is becoming less of a separate tool and more of a conversational doorway into my own accumulated work.
Knowledge Letter: Issue: 315 (Subscribe)
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Image Credits: Midjourney
(Public Domain)
