Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans. He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting. Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call — others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was starting to impede human interaction.
“I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he has occasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.
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Experiences like Sellers’s are becoming more common as AI tools gain momentum in white-collar workplaces, offering time-saving shortcuts but also new workplace etiquette conundrums.
The pandemic Zoom boom forged new expectations around meetings that can feel onerous by the fifth — or even second — video call of the day. Now workplace social protocols are being upended all over again by AI tools that promise to make it easier to tune out while in a meeting or offer the temptation of skipping calls without penalties altogether. It’s not unusual for people to join video calls with their camera off and microphone muted, but such lurkers can at least be called upon to speak.
Major workplace tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet offer note-taking features that can record, transcribe and use AI to summarize meetings a person is invited to but doesn’t attend. A profusion of smaller companies, such as otter.ai, offers apps that workers can use to send AI meeting agents to capture calls in a similar way. OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently added a record mode that can function as a meeting note taker. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
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Participants can’t send their note takers to present to a meeting on their behalf — yet. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has said the company wants to allow users to create “digital twins,” or AI assistants, that can eventually attend meetings for people and take action in their place.
‘Nothing will be forgotten’
Sending an AI bot to experience things in your absence could be the next logical step after social media and smartphones created the expectation that anything that can be recorded, will be.
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