It was a joke video from the onion about outsourcing their own jobs to India. This is kinda the same but with AI.
I know it's only for translation now but how long until "copilot" joins meetings on my behalf?
Well, they have my voice (Teams), they have my image and biometrics (Windows Hello for business), they know everything i do a the computer (Recall) so they can replace me with an AI.
Just think at the next headlines: Microsoft increases the price of Office 365 bundling a new feature: virtual employees.
Then we hold virtual meetings where virtual managers create PowerPoint slides with AI and virtual employees "listen" and in the end AI summarizes everything into something no one will ever read? :D
No, they train the next LLM on it.
While the civilisations are long-gone, they build up the Kardashev ladder for the sole purpose of producing more of nothing.
Finally, all cosmic resources being expanded, they shut down. Since nobody remained to observe, it is unknown whether in a brief flash of self-awareness, realising the meaninglessness futility of their existence, the machines commited suicide.
Only tangentially related, but hustle culture meets remote work: https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed
Remember that we need more people to learn how to code (the corporate nonsense that many developers here and elsewhere amplified in 2018)!
Also FYI someone actually decided to lived by that principle and even wrote a NYT bestseller about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Workweek
But it doesn't need to be my voice. It in fact should be illegal for Microsoft to use my voice for training without my express consent, and even then they must delete all models and data about it when requested. And it should be illegal for an employer to request or expect it.
Any control over that is going to be through social and legal mechanisms, it isn't going to work to try to prevent access to the needed data.
I bet you haven't read their privacy policy. It starts with: "Your privacy is very important for us." /s
Laundry list of breaches: https://firewalltimes.com/microsoft-data-breach-timeline/
Profit over customer: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-gold...
One example mitigation I implemented at a local bank is to have them disable most aspects of internet access to my accounts. They are read-only from the internet and outbound wire transfers are blocked. They now require my physical presence and I make sure all the employees know me personally. I test them from time to time on the phone. My goal is to terminate business relationships with anyone I can not do this with. This will be too much for some people at first, having to treat every business relationship as hostile and I am not even sure I can get 100% completion of my goal
I do not know how to solve this on a global scale. I think the only way things start changing around this vulnerability is when powerful people experience shared pain. Lawmakers, executives, investors, etc... Such as businesses losing billions because some department thought they were talking to a real person and governments losing large amounts of tax revenue when more companies have this capability and it gets abused by deviants. Curious what happens when the fake POTUS calls the real Vladimir and Xi.
Sophisticated Phishing attacks, blackmail, destroying someones public image
Yeah, no. Automatic text translation is "ok" but automatic translation direct into a work meeting in your voice? Enjoy your HR meetings and lawsuit for unfair dismissal based on botched translation.
What makes you think they won't make the same mistake again with their voice? You just have to bait people with features of convenience in return for their data.
There's a reason history keeps repeating itself.
If we can get only AIs to take meetings we can save a lot of work in offices.
Zoom has the same dream: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24168733/zoom-ceo-ai-clone...
Eventually we can also decouple scheduling meetings and reading summaries from humans. And then we can all spend time working instead of in meetings.
The robots can archive all their summaries, and have follow up meetings to track status of action points they invented. As long as they do not bother humans it will be a great boon to productivity.
Using AI for this is like a trying to solve a self-created problem. If human meeting culture would have just used an issue tracker and e.g. emails for this, this all would not have been necessary.
Human meeting culture exists only because the tools for synchronizing states is so bad in its UX/UI that there is seemingly no better way to do it. If Teams would have had a better UX focussed on issue management combined with better overviews for different roles, they would not have needed AI bots/avatars for this problem.
In all seriousness, I hope that was sarcasm, because otherwise that sounds like absolute hell and the biggest waste of resources since the performance review. Except instead of just wasting time, now it also wastes energy, fresh water, land, and rare earths too.
They need to be dragged out of their comfort zone kicking-and-screaming for public display for the pleasure of others.
And then you can still have a meeting or a call if a non-obvious decision needs to be made, or if clarification and explanation of something is needed.
This is something that should happen in a background process in a few seconds. Therefore eliminating the need to create avatars or clone voices.
How many of y'all would be using this?
Which raises the question: What happens on all the "free" communication platforms like Google Meet and so on? Are the conversations recorded and mined?
The data collection business Salesforce had an "AI" meeting summary feature already years ago.
I guess one positive way to look at it is we're one small step closer to the Universal Translator
Expect encryption like RCS and WhatsApp to go away by popular demand, because when phishing gets too good, the only solution will be a service like Google recording all telephone calls.
Voice cloning will get to the point where it's so good that there's no tech-savvy users who can detect it the way they can for email. Users will demand for protection to be added to their calls because you really can't live without it.
The logical solution will be, we need a service that scans all calls for phishing, just like we have for email. The service cannot be local for the same reason as for email.