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NEWSLETTER 142
 
VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 

Fall from grace: in 2020 and 2021 alone, more than $1.5 billion went to startups in the tech event space, per Crunchbase data. That is no longer the case.

 
 
 
 
 
 
We Need Your PanelPicker Vote
 

Every year SXSW judges which panels will excite the crowds most by asking the crowds to weigh in. We think we’ve got a winner. Your job is to cast your vote. 

 
VOTE NOW
 
 
 
VEG EVENT
 
Will We See You in September?
 
David Adler, founder of BizBash and author of Harnessing Serendipity will join us (with friends) to talk about the power of creating memorable experiences that stay with you long after an event is over.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Zoom’s Cautionary Tale
 
 
 

Imagine that you’re in a Zoom meeting and the conversation is going gangbusters. Now imagine that every word your group utters is being used to train large language AI models. Last week, Zoom users found that the fine print of their Terms of Service Agreement stated that Zoom could use your conversations to train its AIs. 


StackDiary
broke the story on August 11th, though the terms and conditions had been part of Zoom’s contracts for months. The news did not sit well with Zoom users. The downright scary word-for-word wording in the Zoom Terms of Service reads: 


“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.”


Yikes! Zoom responded swiftly and emphatically, reiterating in no uncertain terms that Zoom does not use data from your conversations to train its AIs. The company blamed an “internal process flaw” (which is shorthand for someone F&**#$ up) for the problem and remedied it immediately.


Zoom does use your activity to gather what’s called “service-generated data.” It’s pretty standard practice in cloud-based conferencing. Telemetry data (such as which machines are logging onto a Zoom call), product usage data, diagnostic data, and more help improve the product. 


The back and forth between Zoom and concerned users that went on ping-pong style for most of the week is abating, like most communications crises do. Where it stands now is that Zoom will not collect your data to train its AI models unless you opt in to one or both of its optional AI features using Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose. When you fire up the AI summarizer or AI chat assistant, you (as the meeting administrator) have the option to disable “Data Sharing,” the feature that sends your call data (among other data points) to Zoom for possible AI training. As for your guests, the contract is between you and Zoom only. 


Zoom became the poster child for AI training, begging the larger question of what other companies are doing about capturing your conversations to train their AI algorithms. MS Teams just clarified what it will do with the AI data captured in your meetings. The New York Times preemptively hung out a shingle saying AIs will not be trained on its content, while Google granted itself permission to use public data to train its AIs. 

 

AI hungers for human input in order to learn. That’s the AI rub. It needs your conversations to make itself smarter, but who knows whether you’ve said something true or not, and your words could be ingested at the expense of your privacy or even in violation of a confidentiality agreement. 


What should you do? 

  • Time to start reading those Terms of Service agreements more carefully. Terms of Service writers need to cut the legalese and spell out what they are and aren’t doing.
  • Address what happens when the meeting convener opts in to offer their conversation to train AIs, but the meeting attendees are clueless.
  • It’s time to start discussing fair compensation. If we opt-in to train a company's (like Zoom’s) AIs, should we receive some compensation? (Remember Andrew Yang’s Universal Basic Income? It was an idea before its time but it’s now time to have a serious discussion on how those that feed the LLM engines can reap some of the profits.) See the Worldcoin story below.
  • Enterprises and plain old consumers may be treated differently when it comes to training AI; Regulated verticals such as banking may need to have a different TOS than the rest of us.

At the very least, Zoom’s cautionary tale is a wake-up call. Finally, it’s dawning on us that we fuel large language models. It took us years to recognize that we had fueled social media ad revenues. Hopefully, this new revelation and resolution won’t take as long. 

 
 
Worldcoin Scans Your Eye in Exchange for Crypto
 
 
 

Sam Altman, yes, the same guy who spearheaded ChatGPT and promised a nervous Congress that we’d get through all of this AI madness as better humans, wants his company’s Tools for Humanity and its Worldcoin project to ensure that we all have personal identifiers in the digital world. 

 
 
Worldcoin’s pop-up Orb stations around the world will scan your iris to create a unique biometric ID, and reward you with Worldcoins. Image: Worldcoin
 
 

Loony as it sounds, Worldcoin doles out Worldcoin crypto to people who use its Orb device to scan their iris to create a unique biometric identifier, called World ID. Pop-up scan shops are drawing crowds all over the world. Your iris scan is digitally transformed into a permanent record of your identity. The company hopes that it can authenticate every person in the world for banking, medical, and other services. Identity in the virtual world has been one of the thorniest issues in cracking the metaverse code. Skeptics think it’s just a way to boost Worldcoin currency.


Gimmick or not, Worldcoin’s scan parties are working. According to Journo Research, 24,855 people signed up to have their irises scanned in the first five days and that number continues to grow. Whether it solves our complicated feelings about using cryptocurrency is up for debate. But more importantly, in the “someone’s gotta do it” scenario, Worldcoin could potentially be one of the organizations that doles out our digital IDs. Are you ready for that?  

 
 
 
 
Scuttlebutt
 
 
 

The Psychology of Events
We’re big Victoria Matey fans because she’s sort of the shrink for meetings and events. Her latest “north stars” reminds us again that while technologies may change, humans are pretty much static. 

 
 

Freeman’s AI Tutorial for Event Creators
Interested in incorporating AI into your events workflow? Here’s a starter tutorial.


Apple Vision Pro and Meetings
It’s been two months since the launch of Apple Vision Pro. In addition to enterprise collaborations, we think there’s a strong use case for Vision Pro at meetings and events especially when not all parties can be physically present. One of the great strengths of Vision Pro is that people can engage with digital content and digital elements as if they were physically present. Imagine navigating an expo or trade show from the comfort of your couch, yet feeling as if you're physically present. The possibilities for networking, product demos and virtual walkthroughs are intriguing. 


AI of the Week 
HeyGen will create avatar-based video in just minutes.

 
 

We’re Helping the Industry Create Better Events
The Virtual Events Group is known for its meetings, newsletters, and online database but we are also “event whisperers” to many organizations. Take a look at what’s on tap, especially with our upcoming events. Send us an email if you’d like to be involved. 

 

Verizon and Roblox at The Met
Verizon had  its shot at winning the video conferencing wars with  Blue Jeans (acquired in 2020 for $400 million) but that effort was shuttered last week. This week Verizon is aiming for a simpler win. It teamed  up with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Roblox to let players use an AR app named Replica to scan certain displays within the museum and transfer items to use within Roblox as avatar wearables and accessories. Sort of like a scavenger hunt meets AR.  It gives a whole new meaning to the term The Met-averse. But, you must visit the museum to scan the code and get the app. 

 
 
Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art
 

Talking to Yourself on Zoom
Asynchronous Zoom calls are a fancy way of saying I’m going to record a message and you can play it at your convenience. This week we experimented with Zoom Clips, which is still in Beta. I’m not sure Zoom is the first place my mind goes when I want to send out a video message. All the same, it is useful that they can store these non-real-time conversations. 

 
 
 
 
 
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Robin Raskin | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

Gigi Raskin | Sales/Marketing

917.608.7542 | gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org