Dive Log + AI

Eddie Yung, February 2026

The pile of dive logs I accumulated in the past 16 years has come to its best use since AI began to rule the world starting in 2023. While we can only wish that AI will never replace the role of a diving instructor so as to keep us employed, I can also tell that AI has improved so much in the past couple of years, demonstrating knowledge in various kinds of diving — even technical diving. Now I am pretty sure that you can ask a lot of questions regarding diving and receive some meaningful insights from AI. Mind you, though, you still need a seasoned instructor to help you judge whether the AI is just doing some guesswork for you or not.

The first time I came across Google’s NotebookLM, I kind of thought I had met the dream product of AI 😉 That is, I can upload all my personal diving journals, equipment notes, and diving knowledge developed over the past decade to NotebookLM. Then, I can ask the AI to summarize, conclude, and re-present the materials in whatever ways I want for different teaching purposes. Google claims that whatever you upload to your personal NotebookLM account will not be used to train its own AI. If this is trustworthy, I have managed to make use of Google’s AI without making it smarter in the process 😉

After I have everything in NotebookLM, the AI can:

• Guide me through the process of learning from my own experience again

• Remind me of something I have long forgotten

• Develop course structures based on my personalized teaching style (keeping things that were proven to work)

• Summarize the common challenges that students face in a specific course

• Generate quizzes based on my writings

• Cross-reference equipment notes with dive outcomes to identify which gear configurations worked best for specific environments

• Create realistic "what-if" emergency scenarios for student exams based on actual incidents or near-misses I have logged

• Draft a "Frequently Asked Questions" guide for my technical courses based on the recurring themes in my journals

There are a lot more that can be "re-invented" based on history. It is all up to our imagination.

In conclusion, I’ll broadly welcome this new "digital assistant" to my education team. But let’s be real: until AI figures out how to put on real scuba tanks to the water or handle a OOA drill at 50 meters, I think my job is pretty safe. I’m happy to let it handle the data while I stick to making the bubbles.