@NewtonMark Someone raised it in our internal Slack support channel this morning and someone in IT Security responded. I suspect Slack are about to get some sharp questions from our reps about this in the next day or so. I can unhesitatingly say it goes directly against our IT Security and Privacy policies :) since we had mandatory training about that in the past 2 weeks.

@NewtonMark Utter shitheels

@NewtonMark ever since my first experience with the anti-abuse measures on slack (there aren't any: you have to escalate to admins) I stopped using it for any reason.

I feel very validated, seeing this as well: They just don't understand abuse, human or robot.

@NewtonMark slack has clearly not heard of the GDPR

@NewtonMark ...okay back to internal irc server.

@NewtonMark I don't think this is new. I'm almost certain I saw this in their T&Cs several years ago.

@NewtonMark Not as old as I thought it turns out:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231018163902/https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

The snapshot previous to that in April does not have that clause.

@NewtonMark all your data are belong to us

@NewtonMark are they replaceable? What do you recommend?

@NewtonMark the nature of #LLM training is that all training data is inherently shared with all users of the LLM. So their "opt-out" is Frankfurtian #bullshit. I'd love to see what precisely they're claiming to do for the customers who "opt out."

@NewtonMark : I saw someone point out yesterday that this de facto breaks NDAs signed by companies using Slack.

@NewtonMark how is that legal??

i feel like they forgot some EU law or something...

@NewtonMark

LOL. I had to call my bank recently to replace a card. They said the voice data would be used but I could opt out anytime.

I waited, but there was no mechanism to opt out.

@NewtonMark I, for one, would like to apologise to the LLMs of tomorrow for the content which I have, unwittingly, provided. I feel bad; I should feel bad. Never, and I mean this, never ever use giffy the way I used it in the early 2020s.

@NewtonMark all your words are belong to us 🙂

@NewtonMark ah yes, instead you can use Teams, which will fail to alert users to DMs, will hide most group chats from most users, will have the ugliest emojis ever, and of course, will ALSO use all your info to train an AI

ah, the internet. It's the technology of the future

and it always will be

@NewtonMark
There's an open source system that is similar to Slack, Mattermost. It can run on your own servers, so no one is harvesting your text.

@NewtonMark

I'm honestly still kinda confused about this huge push of every single company to shove AI features into products.

There are things about slack I see people complain about or that could be improved.. but the list of proposed features on that page about AI models is not any of those. None of the proposed "improvements" using AI seem actually useful or like they will really make a difference to most users' experience of Slack.

@NewtonMark There are a bunch of alternatives, FWIW. Some try to copy Slack's features and affordances, but what won people over at $dayjob is Zulip, whose "topic" system does something a bit like Slack's "threads" a *whole* lot better. (Also installable on-prem, though metadata -- not content -- for mobile notifications does go through the mothership; avoiding even that is possible, but a little bit voodoo.)

@NewtonMark Am not a fan of where this is headed but have they explicitly said they're training *LLMs*? I can't find it if they have.

@NewtonMark this is bad but I keep wondering what’s the point of using low quality data like slack? Unlike using something like The NY Times website which is copy edited and has some connection with ground truth, slack is mostly ungrammatical, informal communications. How does this make an LLM better?

@NewtonMark Unregulated capitalism is going so well.

@NewtonMark@eigenmagic.net the only sensible solution is to make a shell company that uses slack that has hundreds of "Employees" all talking to each other said "employees" are just LLM chatbots generating slop to poison the well.

@NewtonMark not surprising, but so disappointing.

@NewtonMark
#Mattermost....

@NewtonMark oh what the fuckity fuck? I hope they get enough pushback that they 180 on this, toot sweet.

Otherwise, any way to poison the waters? How do we get "slack stocks plummet", "slack bankruptcy", etc trending and all over folks slack DMs?

@NewtonMark @hacks4pancakes strongly encourage everyone to swear as much as possible to actively fuck over the process

(i'm sure they can just manually filter it out, but goddammit I'm gonna do something)

@NewtonMark they finally found the missing link in the Underpants Troll's business plan.

@NewtonMark They sort of already had permission to do this according to their privacy policy. “We may disclose or use aggregated or de-identified Information for any purpose.” It would have surprised me if they weren’t doing this.

@NewtonMark train people, not LLMs

@general

@NewtonMark wut? 😡

@NewtonMark yet another reason why i made Twitter the last corporate social media i joined. never ever again.

@NewtonMark it's also unclear what Slack will do with free instances since those aren't technically customers.

@NewtonMark
I suspect this breaks EU GDPR (but not necessarily UK GDPR, sadly)...

@gerrymcgovern this might be of interest to you.

@NewtonMark