Zoom has backtracked all the way on its stance on how it will use artificial intelligence.
The video conferencing company on Friday updated its terms of service to explicitly say that it will not use anything from your Zoom calls to train its AI system.
“Following feedback, Zoom made the decision to update its Terms of Service to reflect Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like Customer Content (such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions) to train Zoom or third-party artificial intelligence models,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Zoom drew vocal backlash on Monday after the company adjusted its terms of service to give it the right to use “service-generated data” to train its systems. That prompted fear that anything we did or said on a Zoom call could be used to make its AI system smarter, tapping into a broader fear of AI.
That same day, the company updated its blog post and terms of service to back away from its initial stance.
“To reiterate: we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent,” Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim said in an updated blog post (in bold typeface).
That apparently wasn’t enough, so Zoom came back on Friday with even stronger language and added it to its terms of service.
Zoom is just one of many companies looking to tap into AI’s capabilities to better augment its service. The explosion in the use of AI — propelled by ChatGPT — has sparked a race between Big Tech companies developing competing systems.