[Air-L] Zoom and AI Training

[Janet Salmons]

Gee, I wonder if they got some pushback on the idea of allowing AI training on Zoom sessions? The Zoom blog now says:
<https://blog.zoom.us/category/company-news/>
How Zoom's terms of service and practices apply to AI features (https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/)
August 7, 2023
It's important to us at Zoom to empower our customers with innovative and secure communication solutions. We've updated our terms of service<https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/> (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

As part of our commitment to transparency and user control, we are providing clarity on our approach to two essential aspects of our services: Zoom's AI features and customer content sharing for product improvement purposes. Our goal is to enable Zoom account owners and administrators to have control over these features and decisions, and we're here to shed light on how we do that and how that affects certain customer groups.

and

We will not use customer content, including education records or protected health information, to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

I wrote to double check this information, and if I hear anything back I will share it with you.

I always record my Zoom meetings to my own hard drive - and that is what I suggest to anyone conducting research interviews, focus groups, etc. on any videoconference platform. Previously, Zoom verified to me that when you do so, no record of the meeting is saved to their servers. (I inadvertently tested this premise when I had a problem with saving a recording to my computer it was well and truly gone and unavailable.)

On a related note, a NY Times article this weekend, "A.I.'s Inroads in Publishing Touch Off Fear, and Creativity" discussed this point:
Writers have joined other artists, coders and content creators in suing A.I. companies, accusing them of using their work to train A.I. systems. The writers don't want their work used without permission. ...Many in publishing are taking action to protect their work. The Authors Guild recently organized a petition signed by thousands of writers demanding that companies seek their approval before using their work to train A.I. programs. Agencies representing illustrators have also revised their contracts to keep their work from being used to feed A.I. programs. Penguin Random House, the country's largest book publisher, said it considers the "unauthorized ingestion" of content to train A.I. models to be a copyright infringement.

While fiction writers and academic writers have different issue, it is the "work used without permission" factor that seems most concerning. And of course work used without permission also means work used without paying the content creator - a big reason Hollywood is on strike right now.

I'd like to explore these issues for academic writers of books and articles on Sage Methodspace (www.methodspace.com<http://www.methodspace.com>) as part of this year's Academic Writing Month in November. If you have ideas or resources to share, please contact me off-list.

Warm regards,
Janet

Janet Salmons, PhD (She/her/hers)
Research Community Manager, SAGE MethodSpace (www.methodspace.com<http://www.methodspace.com>)
Boulder, Colorado USA
jsalmons at vision2lead.com<mailto:jsalmons at vision2lead.com>
Now available! Doing Qualitative Research Online, 2nd edition (https://bit.ly/2ZJ0G5f)