Report: Zoom Using Customer Data to Train AI

Zoom is apparently using customer data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

That’s according to the videoconferencing platform’s terms of service, updated last month and reported Monday (Aug. 7) by CNBC.

According to that report, the update sets Zoom’s right to use some aspects of customer data for training and tuning its AI, or machine-learning models.

“You consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable Law, including for the purpose of … machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models),” Zoom’s terms say.

In a blog post on Monday, Zoom wrote that “for AI, we do not use audio, video or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”

“Your content is used solely to improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services,” the blog post goes on to say.

This is happening as companies’ use of user data to train AI has led to legal action, such as the federal lawsuit filed against OpenAI in June, which claims the company trained its ChatGPT tool using data stolen from millions of people.

The suit accuses the AI company of carrying out a strategy to “secretly harvest massive amounts of personal data from the internet.”

This data, the suit claims, included private information and conversations, medical data and information about children, used without their owners’ knowledge or consent.

“Without this unprecedented theft of private and copyrighted information belonging to real people,” the suit says, OpenAI and ChatGPT “would not be the multibillion dollar business they are today.”

More recently, authors have sought legal redress against AI companies, as seen last month in the lawsuit filed against OpenAI by authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, who say ChatGPT creates summaries of their work that are accurate to a degree that could only possible if the AI had been trained on their books.

PYMNTS reported in May that Zoom was working with — and had invested in — Anthropic, an AI firm backed by Google.

The collaboration involves integrating Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, with Zoom’s platform, beginning with Zoom Contact Center.

“With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer for Zoom, in a news release.