Paperless-ngx is an extensive document management system. 3.0.0 has just been released.
It seems from a user/admin perspective that a lot of obsolete stuff under the hood got removed and they did some performance stuff, but it’s also full of AI features. There’s too many changes to read them all though, I wonder if there’s a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes.
Personally I’ll stay with 2.X for some days at least to see what people say about the new version. I’m not interested to have AI parse my documents, the alrogirthmic auto tagging etc works quite well.
I may be mistaken, but I had looked into Paperless before and saw they had AI features before this. Is it just more, or more in your face? I was under the impression they were optional, at least when I looked into it.
I had a quick look and the AI features that are added:
They do look to be optional at least. I’d probably be a bit more concerned if the code was largely written with LLMs, given the large number of commits in what looks to be only a few months.
I upgraded and havent enabled the AI stuff and I literally cant tell it’s there, not sure why people are freaking out. Seems like theres a lot more in it as well.
They added an AI chatbot that you can ask for information about the contents of the document you’re viewing. There’s more in the linked PR.
Honestly, this is one of those things where you need to define what AI means. Paperless 2.x used a machine learning-backed OCR library called Tesseract that has been in development since 1985.
The current version of Tesseract does use a LSTM neural network, since 2018. Is that an AI? Fuck if I know because AI is a basically meaningless term.
It’s not an LLM or a diffusion model, which is what backs a lot of the things people are calling AI nowadays.
Paperless always had some sort of primitive AI for document classification and auto tagging. I haven’t yet read the changes on 3.x but I’ve been using it for years and it’s like a dumb AI that needs a lot of guidance and manual tagging at first, but as time goes on, it “figures out” every document you throw in the ingest. I’ve been sending it emails, or uploading straight from the mobile app and its amazing, can’t go back to a folder filled with “Download(739).pdf” or “IMG_4926.jpg” files of random recipts and invoices
I agree. The AI features were very lightweight before. Just for auto tagging etc.
Hope this isn’t a shitshow.