Zoom, Data Privacy, and Generative AI.
This is a bit of an older story that, in my opinion, didn’t get its due, in terms of coverage, back when it was first published around of August of this year. The advent of ChatGPT has ushered in an era of what I’ll call “AI-fication.” In seemingly every product category that fits into our digital lives, there’s been a push to incorporate AI. Some ways make obvious sense; others can be a bit of a stretch. But, AI is now everywhere, and that’s a trend with seemingly endless runway.
Zoom, the group meetings platform, has hopped on it. For example, the platform can now use AI to generate meeting notes, likely to the elation of every analyst / junior associate in the world. It’s important to note here that this isn’t just a transcript of the meeting, using relatively rudimentary text-to-speech technology; this is an actual outline, based on the content of the meeting. How? “AI.” Okay, but how does AI actually do that? And here’s where people might typically do a lot of hand-waving and not a lot of actual explaining.
Here’s a good explainer from Google of how AI works. It’s a long video and is definitely worth the watch. However, for our purposes here, the takeaway is: developing good AI requires having access to lots and lots of relatively high-quality data on which to “train” the underlying “model.” And what’s the best source of data to train an AI for business meetings? You guessed it! It’s recordings of actual business meetings. Your business meetings.
That’s at least what Zoom wanted to do, and explained so in an updated to its Terms of Service. And, as you can imagine, people went ballistic. Unsurprisingly, in an update, Zoom quickly walked the change back. Now, users can “opt-in” to sharing their data for use by Zoom in AI training. Great. Solved, right? Not quite.
As reported in this AP article, the “opt-in” is only required from the meeting administrator. So, if your boss at work were to set up a Zoom meeting and consent to data sharing, that consent would be applicable for the entire meeting, including your participation in it. Is that an acceptable thing for your boss to consent to on your behalf? Is it even legal for them to do so? Can your employer mandate your consent? All good questions! And with answers that turn on the prevailing laws of the applicable jurisdiction(s).
I suspect that this isn’t the last we’ll hear on this, and it’ll be incumbent upon responsible business leaders to proactively address issues of workplace data privacy and “mandatory consents.”
GOP Scramble.
I made a truly terrible dad joke to a friend of mine via text this morning. “What’s the worst breakfast food ever? Scrambled Republicans.” That was the first time I’d written anything on the current state of the House Republican Conference and their speakership farce. But, as they say, “once the egg’s been cracked, you’d best make an omelet,”1 and so here we go:
The circus show being performed in the House continues, as CNN’s Stephen Collinson writes. If you’re curious as to how we got here—the first ouster of the speaker of the House of Representatives in United States History—this article on USA Today does a fairly succinct job.
The tl;dr here is that the House Republican Conference is starting to look a bit Lord of the Flies. Last week, in the halls of Congress late into the night, frustrated GOP congressmen did their best to convince CNN’s Manu Raju that everything was fine, and that Jim Jordan would be elected speaker after that, umm, detour of trying to elect Steve Scalise. But it was not fine, of course. Not fine at all.
So, what happens now? No McCarthy, no Scalise, no Jordan. House GOP Conference has a small but growing faction (factions?) of apple-cart-upsetters, and today’s (Monday’s) agenda item is running a “beauty pageant” of nine (that’s right, nine) new hopefuls for the House speakership. But I don’t think the problem for the conference is in the candidates; it’s in the tyranny of the minority they’ve allowed to come (back) into existence.
Historically, any one member of the House could sponsor a motion to remove the speaker of the House. In 2019, under then-speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democrats voted to change the rule to require a majority of either the House Republican Conference or the House Democratic Caucus to be able to do so. I’m no big fan of Nancy Pelosi’s, but this seems like a good change. Stability is good! Having one person being able to throw a significant wrench into the works is…bad! Okay!
So, fast forward to January of this past year, and the debacle that ensued when House Republicans were trying to elect Kevin McCarthy into the speakership. It took 15(!) rounds of voting to get the job done, thanks to the efforts of a small faction of would-be spoilers led by Reps. Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, or Ken & Barbie from The Upside Down. But the election of McCarthy didn’t come without its pound of flesh for the stranger things, as they demanded—and won—a change-back of the rules to allow a single member to move to remove the speaker.
Let me break this down for a second: Imagine you and a group of your friends are trying to figure out where to go for dinner. Most of you agree to go to Chili’s. One of the group says no, and that they would rather pepper-spray you in the face instead, if only they had a can of pepper spray. You say “Okay, if you agree to come to Chili’s this time, I will give you a can of pepper spray.” Your friend begrudgingly agrees, swaddling their new toy in a warm embrace and waiting, just waiting, for the right time to use it.
That’s basically House GOP politics in 2023. That’s the situation among the people charged with making decisions that affect not only the fate of this country, but perhaps even the fate of the entire world. Great!
Fast forward to the beginning of October, when, in a bid to avoid a government shutdown, then-speaker McCarthy opted to work with his colleagues across the aisle (gasp!) in order to get a crucial funding bill passed through the House and thereby secure funding for the government through November 17th. The. Horror. Work collaboratively with the opposition in a time of crisis? In the flayed mind of Matt Gaetz, there was only one thing left to do: it was time to get spicy.
Dusting off the pepper spray, Gaetz got to work, calling a vote to remove then-speaker McCarthy. It’s important to note here, though, that Democrats would have to come to his aid in order for his plan to work. Republicans control the House in a 221-212 majority, a difference of 5 votes. In order to actually oust McCarthy, Democrats would have to vote en masse for his ouster. And they did.
When all was said and done, Gaetz’s band of rebels (numbering 8 in total) were joined by 208 Democrats, yielding a vote of 216-210 in favor of removing McCarthy from the speakership. This was…not great? Given the parade of horribles that followed as would-be replacements—which the Democrats were surely aware of—why would they vote to get rid of McCarthy? The answer is sort of complicated.
Remember that time McCarthy gave Gaetz the pepper spray? The appeasement didn’t end there. No, in a classic case of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Gaetz and his sub-party of intransigents stymied any efforts at moderation by a GOP struggling to get things done, and festooned any efforts at productivity with carveouts for the hard-right (e.g., in the case of the Pentagon funding bill). House Democrats, as you might imagine, weren’t best pleased by all this. Nevertheless, would any other member of the House Republican Conference who would be electable as speaker (big caveat, I know), be able to do any better? I’m not sure that the Democratic Caucus fully thought that point through, because I suspect the answer is “no.” It’s all pretty bad, and there’s that line, right? The devil you know vs. the devil you don’t?
In the end, McCarthy’s kowtowing to Gaetz & Co. made him unviable in the eyes of the Democrats, and his work with Democrats to avert a government shutdown made him unacceptable in the eyes of the House Republican hardliners. Trump might be out of office, but the legacy of his chaos-favoring, polarizing politics is thriving in the House Republican Conference. As a bizarre consequence, in a truly unholy alliance, Matt Gaetz & The Democrats2 forced the removal of the speaker.
But it’s not like any of this matters, right? Like, what’s even on the House agenda that’s not getting done right now? Ukraine aid? Israel aid? Avoiding another government shutdown (this one being set to take place on November 17th)? Nobody has time for that right now. They’re all too busy watching a political knife-fight, and everybody should be to blame for the consequences.
