AI/Zoom Meetings

Professional Mariner Forum
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I’ll put this out there for those who have need of it. And also, perhaps, as a warning of things to come. I admit you may already know what I am about to say, and I am just the last person to get the memo, as it were…

I have frequent Zoom meetings with people at sea and ashore. I noticed recently that Zoom has an option called AI Companion. You click on it and a few minutes after the end of the meeting you are sent an email with a text record of it.

Now, these meetings are pretty opaque to people outside the maritime/company circle. A lot of nautical terminology gets bandied about. Also, a lot of talk about Excel spreadsheets, and specific cells in those spreadsheets, as well as completely arcane mathematical concepts like Crew Staffing Rates, which are company-specific.

A human would have a hard time of keeping up with everything being said, and yet filter out all the cross-talking and interruptions normal to such meetings.

The first time I received the meeting notes from AI Companion I was gobsmacked. It wasn’t a transcript of what was said. It was an actual report, as if taken down by a company colleague who knew exactly what we were saying, understood it all, and who deleted all the useless folderal. In particular, every mention of spreadsheet cells and what was done with each was faithfully recorded.

Moreover, at the end the AI came up with a bullet list of things for each member of the team to do after the meeting, which was spot-on.

I’ve used the feature several times after that. Same result. It is as if I had an office assistant taking feverish dictation, but better and faster.

If there are any stenographers left out there they will be out of a job very soon.

One last thing: in the first such meeting I made a point, for juvenile fun, of dissing the AI in a detailed, erudite, and prolonged manner.

Not one word of it was mentioned in the report.

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I wonder where else that report goes

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True. Once it’s in the ether, one must assume that at least one entity has future access to it. I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to think that all of our bazillion conversations are being monitored or recorded, but dang. That could be useful.

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That sort of summary would be helpful to a competitor in certain cases. Somewhere way down in the AI fine print it likely says they can use this information to “improve their product and user experience”

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Post 911 all your rights were waived in the name of security so they record everything now.

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Improve their profit when selling it

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How does it work on technical and nautical language? As a lawyer we continually had to proof/correct deposition transcripts because the court reporter didn’t recognize nautical terms.

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I’ve had the same problem. The classic error: instead of “cargo hold” the reporter will write “cargo hole’.

So far the AI seems to suss it out pretty well. But we haven’t tried ‘athwartships’ or ‘gudgeon’ yet. I’ll give those a go today and report back.:grinning_face:

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True. But a competitor would get even more information from the spreadsheet being shared on the screen, which is a fixture of standard Zoom meetings to begin with. So, using Zoom et al minus the AI is already fraught with espionage possibilities.

Another eerie facet of using AI Companion is its facility with names. Participants of a Zoom meeting log-on of course, so the AI knows who is talking when, and faithfully mentions the speakers’ names in the record. But it also captures the names of people being mentioned and spells them out better than most people could.

We have a fella with an unusual Irish name. Not
‘McDonough’ but some like that and more obscure. The AI spelled it correctly.

I thought that maybe the AI drew the name off a spreadsheet we were displaying. But then it slightly misspelled a Slavic name that was also on the spreadsheet, dropping one of a double consonant.

So, it wasn’t looking at the spreadsheet but must have been comparing the name’s sound pattern with billions of other sound patterns to make a guess at the best match, and nailing it.

I don’t know if I like or dislike this technology but I am amazed by it.

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“So far the AI seems to suss it out pretty well. But we haven’t tried ‘athwartships’ or ‘gudgeon’ yet. I’ll give those a go today and report back.:grinning_face:”

You’re just trying to stick a pintle in the AI balloon.

Sorry, I’ll just get my hat and coat.

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Meanwhile, if you ask an AI about other things…

https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2025/12/04/vital-cat-update/

Poor author finding out that he has a cat he didn’t know about. Oh, never mind, his imaginary cat died, now he has another imaginary cat that- oh huh. Hallucinations galore!