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AI

Zoom Will Let AI Avatars Talk To Your Team For You (theverge.com) 38

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Zoom is getting one step closer to letting AI avatars attend meetings for you. As part of a broader AI expansion, Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team. From a report: To create a digital avatar, you'll need to record an initial video of yourself that Zoom's AI will use to make an avatar that looks -- and even sounds -- like you. From there, you can write the message you want your AI avatar to say and then have it do all the talking for you. This feature will only work with Zoom's Clips feature, allowing you to record brief video updates for your colleagues.
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Zoom Will Let AI Avatars Talk To Your Team For You More

Zoom Will Let AI Avatars Talk To Your Team For You

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  • One step closer to Severance (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sending my "innie" to attend useless meetings and update my PM sounds blissful actually.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )
      I'm pretty antisocial. Having an avatar attend meetings for me would be a win all around!

      • Re:One step closer to Severance (Score:4, Insightful)

        by taustin ( 171655 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @01:35PM (#64851613) Homepage Journal

        Having every employee send an avatar would completely automate the meeting, and let the employees actually get some work done in what would otherwise be useless, dead time.

        • Re:One step closer to Severance (Score:4, Insightful)

          by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @01:53PM (#64851677)

          Having every employee send an avatar would completely automate the meeting, and let the employees actually get some work done in what would otherwise be useless, dead time.

          The further advance that is needed is having AI write the message along with the avatar. Then follow that up with AI reading messages from coworkers. And more AI writing follow-up messages.

          This is how you get orders of magnitude improvement in worker productivity. And we know that productivity is more important than correctness.

          • AI meetings. Wow. Well, I keep hearing that no one of us is as dumb as all of us in big meetings. I suppose adding artificial to the lack of intelligence a big group has will really help improve things. Because artificial is always superior to real. Genuine Faux Leather style.

        • Sounds to me like a meeting that should just be cancelled, much like about 80% of every meeting ever scheduled.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )
      Can it attend HR meetings for me as well?

    • But as a sole proprietor, I'd rather send my innie to run meetings for me- start meetings on time, manage the admission of people into the meeting, that sort of thing.

  • At some point it will happen. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @01:31PM (#64851603) Homepage
    There will be a virtual meeting, and the only one that isn't a bot will be kicked out for disagreeing with the bots. Then fired by email.

  • There's a Good YouTube Video About This (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Billy the Impaler ( 886238 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @01:37PM (#64851621)
    Angela Collier, and astrophysicist and part-time youtuber, put out a non-technical video pointing out how silly and poorly-thought-out this idea is. One of her points is that if my company paid to have an AI clone built of me that was capable of doing my work and making exactly the decisions in meetings I'd make so I could hang out on a beach, why would they continue to pay me? https://youtu.be/dKmAg4S2KeE [youtu.be]

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 )
      If the AI wasn't fully capable of doing your job, but it was capable of going to a meeting, looking like you, asking a few questions in your interest, then emailing you a one-page summary of a 1-2 hour meeting, that'd have serious value. It means only reading the email in under 5 minutes instead of wasting 60-120 minutes. That seems pretty viable.

      • But this becomes a sort of technological pyramid scheme that collapses the second *EVERYONE* in the meeting is an AI avatar.

        What, of value, do bots discuss amongst bots? How do they decide which questions to ask each other and how do they make decisions on behalf of their humans that obligate those humans towards certain action items? This, in my opinion, is what the real purpose of a meeting ought to be. To get a group of key people in the same room together discussing a problem and arriving at an agreed u

    • "They kinda let really rich people with companies say stupid shit without, like asking them about it"
      lol
      "it's some down the stack"
      LOL

      I'll be at the beach. Talk to my avatar, it knows exactly what decisions I'll make in any situation so.. beach time.

    • This is an in to start training human replacements. Create a quasi-you that's pretty lackluster, send it to the drippy meetings where you nod your head once or twice at questions and otherwise just absorb info. They'll absorb all the info, you'll get little snippets. You'll train it a bit more to get a bit better about asking the questions you'd want to ask, it'll learn more from the next few meetings. And so on, and so on, until one day, surprise! You're no longer needed! PRODUCTIVITY!

    • "why would they continue to pay me?"

      Why not support a strong basic income and just enjoy the fruits of what used to be your labor?

  • Obviously.
    "Hey Avatar, what did Joe's Avatar say at the meeting?"
    Or maybe.... only the boss's Avatar will be allowed to attend the Zoom call. It's a huge productivity boost.. if you're the boss. Then if you're the boss of other people, you can send your avatar to chair the meeting that pisses off all the other meatbags.
    See recent article about a US congressman using an AI avatar. I could be wrong on that one, I thought I saw that here, but it was in mainstream media... but who's got time to read every notio

  • What's your angle?
    I'll buy that!
    See you next week!

  • Send me an email or talk to me in person. Or do without me.

  • ...an AI Avatar! Ever!
    I might want a useful AI assistant once it's perfected, but an avatar is the most awful, useless thing imaginable

  • When people die, and/or people lose money or jobs due to your AI Avatar's recommendations: you know it won't be an Avatar being sued in court. It will the human that is associated with that Avatar. Secondary; if a vicarious entity replicates an Avatar, that for all perceived senses, tells falsehoods in your place; it will be your responsibility to prove innocence.

    • I wonder how far we are from the first court case for fraud when someone is found having multiple work from home jobs using AI to perform them.

  • What's next? water troughs and hitchracks for the future robotic horses?

    If everything is a puppet show with pretend-people talking to other pretend people via Zoom or whatever, it would be much better and efficient to have a bunch of bots talking in text all inside some OAI or Gemini chat room.

    And that's what will happen, actually. Removing the excess weight of old traditions wanting to project themselves into a future where they won't be needed.

  • How long (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:31PM (#64851777) Journal

    How long before it's all just AI avatars chatting with each other in meetings?

    No people, just chatbots 'talking' back and forth, endlessly regurgitating the topic at hand, beating it to death?

    Frankly, I'm not 100% sure I could tell the difference. I just got out of a meeting like that. The AIs would probably be better and more succinct.

  • Idiocracy (Score:3)

    by az-saguaro ( 1231754 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:32PM (#64851783)

    One of the great nerd movies of all time is Real Genius, 1985, with Gabe Jarrett and Val Kilmer, about college kids doing laser research which, unbeknownst to them at first, is slated for satellite weaponry.

    As the semester starts, the lecture halls are filled with teacher and students. Day by day, fewer students show up, instead leaving a tape recorder to take notes. Eventually, the teacher is talking to just recorders, then finally, the lecture is being delivered by a tape recorder talking to the other recorders.

    With AI, we can now do even better. The teacher can fake the lecture, just have teacher-AI make up its own recording. It can be distributed electronically on a network, no need for classes. In response, student-AI's will make up homework answers and essays. Teacher-AI can then grade student-AI's work, and issue a grade into the college office, then send home grades to mom and dad.

    If anybody with real eyeballs wants to see the work or chain of evidence, right click on said assignment, bring up "Show work", and the avatars will present the AI generated texts.

    We will live in a society of talking heads while real people drink beer and frolic on the beach. All fun of course, until lack of real education and responsibility degrades the ability to make and sustain the talking head equipment and infrastructure. Then, we can have a documentary on how society progressed from Real Genius to Idiocracy.

    • Then, we can have a documentary on how society progressed from Real Genius to Idiocracy.

      But who makes the documentary? MORE AI!

      I haven't watched Real Genuis in ages. The popcorn scene always kills me.

      I do have to wonder how many people are completely unaware that sending an AI avatar to a meeting, implying you trained an AI avatar to at least have some loose idea of what your job is, and what questions you would want answered or at least what tidbits of the meeting should be important to you, is literally just training AI to do a part of their job. However small that part may be, it's a footho

  • ..for being a dumbass that thought some shitty AI avatar could fool people that it's really you.

  • No problem (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @03:45PM (#64852001)

    Please attend my meeting and my avatar [artstation.com] will hand out your work assignments.

  • That scene where Mitch enters the lecture hall where every seat is occupied by a huge tape recorder and the lecturer is replaced by a tape player.

  • Okay, okay, let me get this straight: the user writes something for it to say for their team to see it.

    (1) Typing is slower than speaking. Why not just record yourself speaking if you want to say something?
    (2) Reading is faster than watching. Why would you want your team to watch rather than read?

    Worthless! Maybe it would give a personal touch to what you're saying-- oh, wait, it's not actually you.

  • Honestly, businesses will not tolerate this. Either you see a real person or not at all. Fakery is not professional, and doesn't convey the right image. It is another gimmick that won't be tolerated.

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