Zoom's CEO wants a manipulatable AI avatar of you to attend meetings instead

Date:
Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:25:05 +0000

Description:
Zooms CEO and founder Eric Yuan would rather you and he both didnt attend the meetings his company was designed to make happen.

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The founder and CEO of video conferencing company Zoom wants AI avatars to take your place, despite meetings being the entire point of his company.

Yuan made reference to the idea of having a digital twin that you can count on, presumably to say all of the things you would say in an interview anyway, in an interview with The Verge .

Were not there yet, said Yuan, but thats a reason why theres limitations in todays [large language models]. Everyone shares the same LLM. It doesnt make any sense. I should have my own LLM Erics LLM, Nilays LLM. All of us, we
will have our own LLM. Essentially, thats the foundation for the digital twin." Your own personal LLM

Every morning I wake up, an AI will tell me, Eric, you have five meetings scheduled today. You do not need to join four of the five. You only need to join one. You can send a digital version of yourself, he went on.

For the one meeting I join, after the meeting is over, I can get all the summary and send it to the people who couldnt make it. Again, I can leverage the AI as my assistant and give me all kinds of input, just more than myself. Thats the vision.

I can kind of see why Yuan wants Zoom to expand its brief: the company was
the breakout star of a global pandemic, and now youre spoilt for choice if
you want to have a meeting from the comfort of your own home while wearing a buttoned shirt over a penguin onesie.

The company needs to survive for the shareholders wellbeing. Its super relatable. However, this ideas a bit ridiculous, isnt it? Most of the Verge interview is in there are no bad ideas mode, but I am not that mode.

Theres some argument to be made for notes on meetings to be made and sent automatically to be sent - but thats nothing new. I dont even have to check our archives to Microsofts Copilot software already does this , as does
actual Zoom , without the bell and whistle of an avatar purporting to be you in the meeting. Nothing meaningful is being added here.

So, you can either send a robot version of yourself to annoy your co-workers
/ minions, or a journalist who has taken an hour out of their day to find out that you cant be bothered.

The future Yuan is positing of a journalists personal LLM and a CEOs LLM talking to each other to create content, or whatever, is violently bleak in itself, but then Yuan cant help but let slip that, underneath his desire for an artificially intelligent digital twin who can reliably impersonate him, is his desire to manipulate that AI bot so that it can manipulate others.

Sometimes I dont join a sales call with customers. I know my weakness before sending a digital version of myself. I know that weakness. I can modify the parameter a little bit. [...] For that meeting I say, Hey, tune that
parameter to have better negotiation skills, send that version, and join.

And then theres the inevitable nightmare of an executives perfect artificial self, attuned for a specific purpose, being wielded against a consumer
public. If youve made a mistake - maybe you've turned AI into a massive, sweeping security risk - send your AI hologram with the contrition fader cranked to 11. Have a disappointing product that youve placed arbitrary
limits on in the pursuit of infinite growth? Set that sincerity dial to max for your keynote announcement vid, baby. (Image credit: Shutterstock / LookerStudio)

Here we see a treatment of the symptoms, not the disease. If you dont need to join four of the five meetings, those meetings shouldnt be happening, and
just not turning up is also an option. Dont window dress it.

Talk to the journalists you want to talk to, but dont foist your robot
tribute act on the ones you dont just because youre too socially awkward or
on enough of a power trip to be honest about that.

As a journalist, that this idea has even come up makes me even less likely to want to talk to anyone who runs a company, because Id want to pick their brain, not the machine-learned knowledge bank that they want me to pick.

I dont get it. I think Im supposed to be excited about it in the pursuit of technological advancement, but I actually see it deepening the divide between consumer and company. You are putty, there to be oblivious to leading arguments and deceit so that you submit to becoming a number on a
spreadsheet.

if were now at the point where executives cant even be bothered to do their own false sincerity, then that divide is clearer than ever, and you need to
be thinking more critically about what a company is putting in front of you, especially as AI improves and it becomes less and less clear how much is real and what is synthetic.

The implications of this are woeful, and anything thats been implemented as
an evil plot in Doctor Who is objectively a horrible idea. However, Yuan deserves some credit for having made a thought-provoking pitch for CEOs being the perfect job to be eradicated and replaced by artificial intelligence.

An AI LLM of me wouldnt come out with that, so color me uninterested. More from TechRadar Pro "An AI Stephen Hawking would look like him": Holographic avatars of long-dead celebrity scientists could work with or compete with living university lecturers Zoom is cutting hundreds more jobs as conditions fail to improve Nvidia unveils next-generation Rubin AI chips as it surprisingly launches the new era of AI sooner than expected



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/software-services/zooms-ceo-wants-a-manipulatabl e-ai-avatar-of-you-to-attend-meetings-instead


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