Using AI Assistants

[plehegar]

AI assistants during teleconferences can be used for:

1. translation of spoken languages
2. voice transcripts (accurate or polished)
3. note transcripts
4. ask follow-up questions
5. identifying takeaways, summaries, tasks
6. creating new content from meeting notes
7. suggesting next steps

So far, we only have a policy that covers transcripts.

Should we look at policies/guidelines for all of the other cases?

cc @swickr @dontcallmedom @tidoust @iadawn

[amyvdh]

Please be sure to add privacy considerations (all parties agree to be recorded and their words to be sent to a 3rd party). In addition, I think we should state every instance where AI is used needs to be added in any resulting info and that there's always a commitment that an actual person will verify the information.

I wish there was encouragement to consider, like printing out paper or taking flights, some consideration of the ecological toll of using AI.

[koalie]

I wish there was encouragement to consider, like printing out paper or taking flights, some consideration of the ecological toll of using AI.

Thanks @amyvdh

STRONG +1 to this, @plehegar

This draft guidance seems premature to me. We started a team-internal conversation a few months ago about whether we wanted to adopt a stance to allow or restrict our usage of AI. This draft circumvents this conversation. Please let us not put the cart before the ox.

That being said, in case where we opted to welcome some usage of AI, it would be ideal to me (wearing my Comm hat on) if we were able to craft the right warnings and be specific what we consider OK and NOT OK.

I want to avoid at all costs that W3C be seen as giving anyone carte blanche vis-à-vis AI. Nothing is normal about AI, unfortunately, from provenance of collected data being unfairly or illegally done, to unreliability of tasks, to the appallingly disproportionate amount of energy and water AI uses to complete tasks more or less badly.

[cwilso]

This draft guidance essentially says "don't use this", does it not?

I would absolutely agree that W3C should not give carte blanche vis-à-vis AI tools. At the same time, having to rely on volunteer human scribes is a poorer experience than using transcription tools, and with some management of the process, I believe it's possible to avoid at least some of the concerning aspects of automated transcription. (We have, for example, worked out agreement in order to use automated transcription and summaries for WHATWG triage meetings. We do human editing passes, and do not share the raw automated output.)

[iadawn]

Part of the reason this came about was because of an event in one of my meetings. This relates specifically to Zoom's AI Companion. It is worth noting that the AI Companion is not necessary for transcripts or for using transcripts as an approach to minuting. Nor is it required for translations (I believe).

The key use case we have for switching on AI Companion is to support participants with cognitive disabilities. This is an important use case that it would be remiss of us to forget.

The challenge we had was that a participant from a public sector organization identified internal policies they had which imposed limits on their participation in certain circumstances related to privacy and data protection when such AI tools were involved. This covered the legislative region in which the data was stored (if at all) and whether data was used as training data for AIs.

There a couple of options available that can mitigate the concerns raised, although there is a good chance they will cause other problems:

• Managing data and storage locations - the storage location for recordings, recorded transcripts and other things can be specified. This option is available on any paid account.
• Retain and access meeting transcripts - this option (I think) stores the transcript of the meeting and makes it available for the AI companion . It is not clear if this means that it is used for training purposes.

There are a number of other options related to to AI companion and data protection:

• Auto-delete meeting summaries
• Only share meeting summaries by email
• Show a custom disclaimer when turning on AI Companion in a meeting

This is all by the way of background information for the discussion. However, I will reiterate that AI Companion has a significant use as an assistive technology. There is often a tension between security and accessibility. Can we please not fall into the usual pattern of security trumping all and people with disabilities being excluded as a result.

[reidmore-online]

FYI unfortunately in the case of Zoom, AI Companion is required to get transcripts, it looks like they got rid of the functionality to save transcripts separately from AI Companion. Zoom does say they do not use transcripts or the meeting contents to train AI Companion here: https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0057623

We have used it in meetings in a CG setting and it has been successful for us so far, I think we should be having a conversation about encouraging this if Zoom AI Companion meets our security/privacy concerns. It should be up to groups how to use it, when to use it, but it's worth discussion.

Just as an example, my CG's workflow for using it currently is that I get the transcript, I do a first pass and clean it up/format it, I then copy it into pad.w3.org, share that link with the CG, leave it open for about a week, then close it and save the minutes in HTML to our repo. I delete the transcript off zoom (I'm not using W3C zoom for this, but my org also has a retention policy of only 30 days).