Zoom may be the driving force behind remote work and virtual meetings, but the company is telling employees to leave home and return to the office. Meanwhile, users are taking issue with Zoom’s approach to building generative AI features.
Zoom from the office
Zoom would probably be content if it were only in the news for calling employees back to the office while being responsible for making remote work possible. CNN shared a statement by the company that explains its new hybrid work policy:
In a statement, Zoom said it’s now enforcing a “structured hybrid approach,” meaning that employees who live near an office “need to be onsite two days a week” because it’s “most effective” for the video-conferencing service.
“As a company, we are in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers. We’ll continue to leverage the entire Zoom platform to keep our employees and dispersed teams connected and working efficiently,” the company said.
TLDR: Without work-from-home mandates, Zoom is pitching itself as the solution for connecting satellite offices.
AI-generated controversy
More relevant to Zoom customers is how their data is being handled when it comes to generative AI tools. In short, some users are interpreting Zoom’s terms of service as permission for the conferencing software to use video and audio to build AI features. This 88-word chunk of legalese is getting the most attention today:
You consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable Law, including for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models), training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof, and as otherwise provided in this Agreement.
Zoom is undeniably guilty of creating this atrocity against the English language, but the company is calling foul on claims that it’s using user data to build generative AI without express consent.
In an effort to clarify any misinterpretation, chief product officer Smita Hashim published a post called “How Zoom’s terms of service and practices apply to AI features” today. The message? “We do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”
Specifically, Zoom has deployed two generative AI features so far: Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose. The company emphasizes that “account owners and administrators control whether to enable these AI features for their accounts.”
When you choose to enable Zoom IQ Meeting Summary or Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose, you will also be presented with a transparent consent process for training our AI models using your customer content. Your content is used solely to improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services. And even if you chose to share your data, it will not be used for training of any third-party models.
In sum, Zoom says it does not use video call content to power its generative AI features, despite the viral posts citing its terms of service.
If nothing else, this is a great example of how terms of service are written by and intended for lawyers. Can we put a 20-word limit on sentences in these documents? Zoom simply should not require a blog post that attempts to translate its terms of service for users.
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