Imagine you had a personal assistant who could compile reports of your online meetings in a nice layout, with a summary, a list of the most important topics, decisions and action points. A report, moreover, in which everyone involved is named in full, with the correct spelling. You don’t even need to attend the meeting yourself.
That assistant already exists: it’s called Read.AI. It is an AI bot, a piece of software you can install in your Teams account. You can let the bot attend Team meetings that are scheduled in your diary. It can process written and spoken language, including Dutch. You can configure it so that the report it compiles is sent immediately not just to you but to everyone who attended the meeting. Convenient, right?
Convenient it may be, but still not necessarily a great idea.
All of a sudden, a meeting report had already been distributed with sensitive details of an ongoing study.
Because the report hasn’t been checked for errors. Or because it might contain sensitive information that shouldn’t have been included in so many words. Because once the report has been replicated and distributed among all the participants, you can never undo that. And because you can be sure the report is not only in everyone’s inbox but also stored on the server that runs this AI bot.
Of course, this is a fairly dramatic interpretation of the situation, but what if it happened to you? I spoke to a colleague (from another university) who did have this experience. All of a sudden, there was a report with sensitive details of an ongoing study, and the report had already been distributed. A human taking the minutes would have taken much greater care in formulating the information. It turned out the free version of Read.AI had been installed by a postdoc who had moved on a while ago but was still on the distribution list for this meeting. When asked about it, he was shocked because he had no idea what he had done.
Read.AI is presented as ‘transparent’: after all, it doesn’t do anything you didn’t configure yourself, right? Of course. But when installing an app, so many people click blindly to get through the installation quickly. Sure, you still have to give the bot permission to attend the meeting. In this case, the human host had clicked ‘admit’ at the start of the meeting without thinking when the bot asked for admission along with all the other participants — and hey presto, it had permission.
That is how easy it was.
Sjoukje Osinga (57) is an assistant professor of Information Technology. She sings alto in the Wageningen chamber choir Musica Vocale, has three sons who are students and enjoys birdwatching with her husband in the Binnenveldse Hooilanden.