This morning a potential Reach Your Apex student emailed me with a question regarding the recent news that Zoom was rolling out new AI features and whether Reach Your Apex was going to opt out of allowing Zoom to use our meetings and workshops to train their AI.

The answer is WE ARE OPTING OUT.

In fact, we never opted in, and we did not even known about these new AI features. I’m grateful that someone who follows RYA took the time to email and bring this attention. I’m a big believer that open, honest dialogue creates a company that people want to succeed.

It is this belief that makes Zoom’s shenanigans especially concerning. They rolled out the AI changes without an announcement. It wasn’t until eagle-eyed Zoom users noticed the new verbiage that Zoom acknowledged the changes. If they hadn’t been exposed to sunlight, all that user data would have been used without permission.

Zoom has lost a large degree of trust they’d earned with me since the pandemic. I’m willing to give them a pass this time. They really have a nice application for the type of work we’re trying to accomplish at Reach Your Apex. I’d hate to see their platform become unusable due to a lack of company transparency. RYA will find another platform for our service should we and our users be forced into compliance.

Reach Your Apex does not support writers being milked by the large language models that are operating without a care. We don’t support artists having their creations used as training manuals for AI-generated work. We certainly don’t support Zoom using our data or your data without fair compensation.