Zoom’s AI avatars to replace people in meetings? 

Our Report: During its annual developer conference, Zoom announced it’s developing a feature that will allow users to create custom, AI-animated, photorealistic avatars of themselves that they can use to send messages to their work colleagues (and possibly, in the future, even use to attend meetings).

 Key Points:

 Why you should care: Although this is an exciting development for Zoom, the feature has raised concerns over the potential to create deepfakes to spread misinformation, which is something that although Zoom has loosely addressed—reassuring users that it will implement “numerous safeguards” like “advanced authentication and watermarking,”—others in the AI cloning space, have stronger safety measures in place, for example, AI start-up Tavus (which enables users to create virtual personas for personalized video ads), requires users to give verbal consent and Microsoft (which launched a service that creates digital replicas of people) asks for written permission and consent from users before they use the service.