The AI revolution is here whether we like it or not, but among all the good, there are certainly some less positive stories to come from it. Not surprisingly, as a human-created phenomenon, AI language models contain different political biases, according to new research from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Xi’an Jiaotong University. Researchers conducted tests on 14 large language models (LLMs) and found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 were the most left-wing libertarian, while Meta’s LLaMA was the most right-wing authoritarian.
Zoom, like seemingly everyone else, has recently started a push into AI on its platform. The most recent terms of service suggest the company will user data to train their models. The catch is that the is apparently no way to opt out. Given the potentially sensitive nature of data transferred through Zoom this could pose security and privacy risks, particularly in social workers and their employers.
The key part is:
“10.4 Customer License Grant. You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content: (i) as may be necessary for Zoom to provide the Services to you, including to support the Services; (ii) for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof; and (iii) for any other purpose relating to any use or other act permitted in accordance with Section 10.3. If you have any Proprietary Rights in or to Service Generated Data or Aggregated Anonymous Data, you hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to enable Zoom to exercise its rights pertaining to Service Generated Data and Aggregated Anonymous Data, as the case may be, in accordance with this Agreement.”
Terms of Service are full of jargon, and while there’s no guarantee Zoom will be sending video call information to its AI, but there’s no explicit guarantee it won’t. “Customer content” is a fairly broad term, so it certainly seems reasonable to expect further clarity from Zoom about a way to opt-out. If there is no way to opt-out, I will consider using another platform.