ncubeeight

I attend a lot of online conferences and conference calls in Silicon Valley. I had gotten used to the “ Brady Bunch era” of Zoom call grids of checkerboard faces in our pandemic era. But something has shifted in the last year. Now often the meeting room grid designed to show call participants is filled with black boxes that say <companybrand>AI. I know these are LLM based transcription services that folks have employed in their stead which sync automatically to calendars to transcribe meetings that the person doesn’t attend. Having a meeting transcribed is great. But having dozens of AI listening scribes that outnumber the people who actually show up in person to the call does something strange to the meeting dynamic.  In a call I joined this week the host, a very smart friend of mine, was switching off all the AI attendees one by one. After a few minutes the blank identities were gone and the screen was filled with live human faces again. It was just like pandemic Zoom call...