alt Hacker NewsI saw an YouTuber the other day sharing their "day in the life" as an Amazon Software Engineer while promoting (as part of a paid sponsorship) the AI note taking feature of SoundCore headphones, claiming they now record their meetings and receive an AI summary at the end.
I wonder how many companies realise these devices that appear as "headsets" are now funnelling their meetings into these new AI companies who are more worried about the World Cup then replying to security researchers.
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Ai notetaking is such as signal for stupidity but I'm not surprised that it is getting so much traction. It is basically like getting all your lecture notes from the A student so you can fuck around instead of paying actual attention to anything, and hoping the A students understanding of the lecture somehow rubs off on you.
Kind of funny how that is the pitch for a lot of these products. AI to help you take notes in meetings. AI to help you pass an interview. AI to read and write for you. AI to let you be a lazy bastard, in other words.
Well, on the plus side, SoundCore (Anker) are at least reputable enough (even though security teams would still want to review that!):
Under the security part, they do seem to at least be compliant with your typical security standards (HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1, etc.) and claim that all data is deleted within 12 hours of transcription. So it isn't like the contents of your meeting are being siphoned off to some fly-by-night service, at least.
Interestingly, Zoom and presumably others are logging and reporting on device SIDs and names, so those AI headsets are in server-side data associated with specific workers. I imagine Zoom would rather not advertise this data collection openly — and I don’t have personal proof that the data is transmitted to their servers, so perhaps it’s just collected at the client and then not harvested, unlikely as that may be. But that worker may find themselves targeted for termination if their employer’s platform discovers their unauthorized use of non-employer AI to process employer private work output by their Bluetooth device name.
Not trying to be rude or mean here but it should be, "a YouTuber" since YouTuber starts with a consonant sound.
I don't really understand why these "AI notetaking" services/features still exist outside video conference software today -- any company that needs it would have already purchased the license from Zoom/Teams/Slack which takes care of everything including storage and compliance.
I remember while at Amazon, during the "everyone needs to be using AI in every way" push, one of my teammates was proud to present that he had figured out how to split the audio on his mac to record the meeting (because our meeting software didn't allow for recordings without consent) and fed this into speech-to-text and generated summaries of the meetings without any of us knowing (i.e. no consent).
I let him and our manager know that he'd just violated eavesdropping laws across state lines (he's in D.C. and I'm in WA; RCW 9.73.030).
It's amazing how many people don't think that "AI Notetaker" is the same as "I secretly recorded this (as possibly violated the law)"