You may have wondered about other Zoom meetings you’ve attended that make use of Zoom’s AI Companion to generate things like meeting summaries or chat responses. We don’t use the AI companion here at East Shore, and I’d like to tell you a bit about why.
Privacy
Generative AI features in software have been used to “train” features such as chatbots and art generators. While Zoom says they won’t use “personal content” to train AI, the documents are often deliberately vague about what that means. They can also change this at any time and people may not realize it. Some of our East Shore meetings are confidential and we don’t want that content used to train AI models.
Inaccuracy
Generative AI very often “hallucinates” – which is a fancy way of saying it makes stuff up. Recently, some attorneys in the Mike Lindell case were fined after a court filing they submitted using ChatGPT referenced legal cases that simply didn’t exist. Using AI to generate meeting summaries runs the risk of similar inaccuracies. And, it’s unnecessary – we can just record a meeting if we need to check our notes!
Environmental and Justice
Generative AI features consume vast amounts of both energy and water. This disproportionately impacts poorer communities and water-stressed regions. As UUs, environmental justice is a priority, and this kind of AI is simply not necessary.
What We Do Use
In the interest of transparency, there is a feature we do use that can be considered AI. Our Zoom meetings use Zoom’s auto-generated closed captioning. This is a fancier version of speech-to-text that you might use to send a text message while driving, for example. Captions are necessary for accessibility and inclusion, and using these is preferable to hiring a manual transcription service to generate captioning. This feature also creates a transcript of a meeting when it is being recorded.
How to Turn it Off
For the reasons listed above, we strongly recommend that if you use a personal Zoom account for any East Shore meetings that you disable the AI companion functions. They are already disabled on all church accounts. To do this, open Zoom in your browser (the app does not give you access to all the settings), and scroll down on the left side to “Settings”. “AI Companion” should be the first section.
If you have any difficulties, or you have more questions, please email me at [email protected]. I’ll be happy to walk you through the process!
by Jenny Newell, Office Administrator