Zoom created a firestorm this week when they updated their terms of service to include an updated AI policy.
The new terms of service were released in March, but nobody noticed until this week when Hacker News wrote a blog post about the changes.
There was concern Zoom was going to let AI view all of our content and include it in their AI tools.
After a few attempts to clarify their new policy, Zoom CEO, Eric Yuan, reiterated that Zoom would gain user consent for any AI training.
Yuan admitted Zoom made a mistake with the new AI policy and rolled back some of the changes.
Here’s an update I received from Zoom explaining the new policy.
Here’s what you need to know.
Zoom says its AI-powered features are off by default.
The meeting host must turn on the AI-powered features, and other participants are notified. They can decide whether to stay on a call or hang up.
Zoom says account owners and administrators can control whether to enable these AI features for their accounts.
They can also opt out of providing data to Zoom for model training and can change the data-sharing setting at any time.
Zoom is already using AI to power a pair of experimental features, one that summarizes meetings and another that helps draft follow-up communications.
This is an evolving topic we need to stay on top of.
The other day, I noticed Otter.ai has the ability to summarize meetings that I record through my Zoom account.
Every Zoom webinar I attend has dozens of people transcribing the meetings through these extensions.
What are they doing with the content I’m presenting?
I need to find out if there is a way for me to turn off the ability for others to transcribe my content.
Everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon, so we need to stay on top of this topic.
I’m thinking of providing a weekly summary of tech changes like this.
Would you be interested in receiving a weekly update?
Let me know in the comments.
- Ted
