Zoom says its new AI instruments aren’t stealing possession of your content material

Zoom doesn’t practice its synthetic intelligence fashions on audio, video, or textual content chats from the app “with out buyer consent,” in response to a Monday weblog put up from Zoom’s chief product officer, Smita Hashim. She additionally writes that “our prospects proceed to personal and management their content material.”

The corporate’s dealing with of buyer information for AI coaching has come underneath scrutiny after a Stack Diary article reported adjustments to the corporate’s phrases of service that took impact in late July and appeared to provide the corporate broad management over consumer information for AI work.

The brand new sections seem to merge descriptions of Zoom’s license to point out the content material customers wish to have streamed with out in some way giving the service possession over it with the sections regarding AI instruments. Lengthy earlier than the generative AI increase, this identical strategy has raised the ire of customers studying the phrases of service for providers like Instagram and Twitter, in addition to cloud storage websites like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Hashim writes that “our intention was to clarify that prospects create and personal their very own video, audio, and chat content material. We now have permission to make use of this buyer content material to supply value-added providers primarily based on this content material, however our prospects proceed to personal and management their content material.”

The Stack Diary report particularly highlighted two sections in Zoom’s phrases of service, 10.2 and 10.4, that debate how Zoom can deal with consumer information.

Zoom, like many different firms, has been advertising and marketing new AI-powered options as of late, together with a instrument to assist individuals make amends for conferences they’ve missed and one which helps individuals compose messages in its Slack-like Workforce Chat app.

In Monday’s weblog put up, Hashim says that account homeowners and directors can select in the event that they wish to activate the options, that are nonetheless out there on a trial foundation, and that individuals who flip them on will “be introduced with a clear consent course of for coaching our AI fashions utilizing your buyer content material.”

Hashim provides that consumer content material is “used solely to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of those AI providers” and that any shared information “won’t be used for coaching of any third-party fashions.” Hashim additionally says that when AI providers are in use, it tells assembly members.

In Part 10.4, our intention was to be sure that if we offered value-added providers (resembling a gathering recording), we might have the flexibility to take action with out questions of utilization rights. The assembly recording continues to be owned by the client, and we now have a license to that content material as a way to ship the service of recording. An instance of a machine studying service for which we’d like license and utilization rights is our automated scanning of webinar invitations / reminders to be sure that we aren’t unwittingly getting used to spam or defraud members. The shopper owns the underlying webinar invite, and we’re licensed to supply the service on high of that content material.

Zoom isn’t the one firm making AI-related phrases of service updates which have caught some consideration. Google lately up to date its privateness coverage to notice that its AI-powered instruments like Google Translate and Google Bard could be educated utilizing information scraped from public sources on the web.