A recent change to Zoom‘s terms of service pertaining to AI set off alarm bells in Hollywood and the tech world — with some interpreting the videoconferencing provider’s update as granting the company royalty-free rights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations for the purposes of training AI models.
In response, Zoom said it doesn’t use any customer audio, video or chat content for training AI without consent. In addition, the company says, the “service-generated data” it collects is to “make sure that we aren’t unwittingly being used to spam or defraud participants” using its AI-powered features.
A post Sunday on the blog StackDiary said Zoom’s new terms of service appeared to look as if the company was “willing to be all its chips on reusing other people’s content for AI training.”
The post cited section 10.4 of Zoom’s TOS, which says, “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,” including for the purpose of “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” for the “improvement of the services, software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software.”
“This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent,” StackDiary’s Alex Ivanovs wrote.
“Never using @Zoom again,” Justine Bateman, the filmmaker who is an AI adviser to SAG-AFTRA, posted on X (Twitter) Sunday, citing the StackDiary post.
In a blog post Monday, Zoom chief product officer Smita Hashim said the company updated the terms of service in March 2023 to “be more transparent about how we use and who owns the various forms of content across our platform.” According to Zoom, “For AI, we do not use audio, video or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”
Later Monday, Zoom said it updated the terms of service (in section 10.4) to “further confirm that we will not use audio, video or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”
Zoom recently rolled out two generative AI features: Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose, which offer automated meeting summaries and “AI-powered chat composition,” according to Hashim. Zoom account owners and administrators control whether to enable these AI features for their accounts, she noted. If they agree to use the features, they also grant a license to Zoom for AI training.
The licensing language in section 10.4 of Zoom’s terms of service is intended to ensure “that if we provided value-added services (such as a meeting recording), we would have the ability to do so without questions of usage rights,” Hashim wrote. “The meeting recording is still owned by the customer, and we have a license to that content in order to deliver the service of recording.”
The confusion over the AI parts of Zoom’s terms of service comes as SAG-AFTRA and WGA are both on strike as they seek a new contract from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. With regard to AI, the writers union wants AMPTP protections against AI being used to generate scripts or serving as source material. SAG-AFTRA wants guarantees that performers, including background actors, will have full consent and compensation rights over any use of a “digital replica” made of such performers.
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