To the Vimeo community:
Thank you for the warm welcome. It’s wonderful to join the builders of a platform that helps millions of creators share their experiences and tell the stories that make us human.
In my first few weeks, I have been asked by employees, customers, and shareholders about Vimeo’s position on some of the most important questions at the intersection of technology and creativity. Given the importance of these topics, I wanted to take a few moments to open a dialogue with the community.
The history of the seventh art is a history of using technology to be better storytellers. From 1902, when Georges Méliès superimposed images to “crash” a rocket into the moon, to talkies, television, 3D animation, long-form gaming, and 15-second TikToks, each time a new technology was introduced, there was a fear we would lose our voice to the machine. But, each time, we learned that there is an indomitable spirit of what is genuine and what makes us laugh, scared, smile, cry, love, and stand in awe. Artificial intelligence is the next tool, and like previous tools, there is no ghost in the machine.
Millions of creators are already using AI. Vimeo itself offers AI tools to help you record, transcribe, summarize, caption, and index videos. This generation of AI needs to be trained on vast amounts of data to recognize patterns and produce reliable output. The more data the AI receives, the more useful it becomes to users. Vimeo is home to over 650 million videos and a community of 287 million users. We believe that AI can enhance all elements of our community’s process, from creation, to management, to sharing of video. AI can accelerate, personalize, and even protect the creative process. We are also acutely sensitive to the loss of rights and creative voice if AI is used unchecked on the content we are stewards of.
As we started to add AI to Vimeo, we established a set of principles to guide our decisions on what we build, who we partner with, and how to reflect our dedication to ethical, transparent, and inclusive AI development:
- Be socially responsible
- Equip customers with control
- Provide transparency and clarity
- Promote fairness and inclusivity
- Protect privacy and security
Customer trust is sacrosanct to us, and we have been principled about transparency, which is why we have not trained any generative-AI models with content hosted on Vimeo to date. We are also committed to innovating and equipping customers with control over whether they want to use AI or are comfortable with training AI on their content.
Over the next few weeks, we will be gathering input via a survey and community outreach to understand the types of controls our creative community wants with respect to AI. We will be asking your opinions about your use of AI, the training you’re comfortable with, the opt-in and opt-out models you prefer, and how you want us to treat your public, private, and freely distributed videos. If you are a Vimeo account holder and would like to contribute to the conversation, just send an email to [email protected] with the subject line AI survey.
The trust we have among professional creators is essential to Vimeo’s soul. I am personally committed to ensuring that Vimeo engages our community in feedback as we shape a creator-centric and transparent approach to this next generation of tools. Vimeo has always harnessed the innovations of technology to help creators tell their stories. AI holds wonderful promise, and we are committed to making sure its use benefits our community and the amazing stories you tell.
