alt Hacker NewsHere’s a question I have: every professional meeting I now attend is being recorded & uploaded by seen and unseen AI guests. Even 1:1 conversations between direct managers and colleagues.
That’s a world I don’t want to endorse, but it’s seemingly impossible to opt out and stay employed. Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure? Has anyone made it a norm to say “transcription isn’t needed for this meeting so I would like everyone to turn off AI notetaker before we proceed?”
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Automatic transcripts of online meetings are amazing: it means that you can just shoot the shit for half an hour and then have Claude bang out a deck and MVP for review. And no one has to waste time and attention on making notes.
Even better if it's a feedback session or people have notes and comments. You can have them all mock-implemented before you even send out the summary.
I've been in meeting where people turn off AI notes when real stuff gets discussed and turn it back on after. Seems like a good compromise as long as you trust that it's not going to get logged
> Even 1:1 conversations between direct managers and colleagues.
You can ask someone to turn it off.
Get your coworkers together and form a union.
I'm not even kidding. An individual has no protection, if it's workplace policy you can be fired for not following it.
If employees collectively challenge the policy an employer can not legally retaliate against collective action.
One problem with this is that it's very easy to think of ways that having a recording of what was said in a meeting might benefit one or more of the participants, by letting them provide evidence later that another participant is lying about what was said in that meeting. An AI recording of a meeting might well protect your interests in court later.
It's fine, a leak of your meeting to a potential competitor could result in as much as another meeting. ;-(
Hilariously enough the answer is return to the office. I coordinate with my manager to do our 1:1s on days we're both in the office and I know we're not alone.
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>>Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure?<<
author a study that truthfully demonstrates an increased productivity, and by extension, reduction of costs, that appears in the absence of surveilance.
perhaps an ABC test of production under obvious surveillance, obvious lack of surveillance, and advisement of incidental surveilance at any time. this should be cross sectional and longitudinal, perhaps an exit survey to categorize the different productivity groups, such as we took longer because we knew we would have to work at a desk under a camera when we were done; vs the we could do it faster because, we knew we wouldnt be nagged about ergonimics, kinefficiency, or surruptitious movements.
I am part of the problem and recently started turning them on after realizing they were proving to be very useful inputs when using chatbots with connectors to tools that can see the transcripts. It's made scribing notes mostly a ritual and not a practical benefit.
Before I turned it on I asked my team if they had any objections. Silence for eight seconds before saying if anyone was uncomfortable objecting in the group they could reach out to me individually. No one ever did. The only request was that everyone internal get copied on the notes so they could correct them if needed.
These are company decisions to have these connectors and privacy choices. It's their data and their risk. There has never been an illusion that anything said, written, or done at work is private from the company. At home I partake in none of this.