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Slack AI Training with Customer Data

slack.com

281–290 of 426 posts

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#282
post #234
post #227

Well I really hope this massively blows up in their face when all of Europe goes to work just about now, and then North America in 5-8 hours. Let's see if we have another Helldivers 2 event that makes them do a hard backpedal after losing thousands of large customers that will not under any circumstances take the chance. I have a friend with a law firm who just called me yesterday for advice as he's thinking about sw…

But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem? Also, is Teams (and other messengers) any different?

The way to opt out is by contacting support,in an era where opt ins and outs should be handled by a toggle button.

Either they don't expect many people to wish to opt their slacks out, or they're aware of the asynchronous friction this introduces and they don't care.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#283
post #89
post #61

> We offer Customers a choice around these practices. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from helping train Slack global models, you can opt out. If you opt out, Customer Data on your workspace will only be used to improve the experience on your own workspace and you will still enjoy all of the benefits of our globally trained AI/ML models without contributing to the underlying models. Why would anyone not opt…

> Why would anyone not opt-out? Because you might actually want to have the best possible global models ? Think of "not opting out" as "helping them build a better product". You are already paying for that product, if there is anything you can do, for free and without any additional time investment on your side that makes their next release better, why not do it ? You gain a better product for the same price, they ge…

"Best" and "better" is doing a lot of extremely heavy lifting here.

Are you sure you actually want what's hiding under those weasel words?

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#285
You can opt-out

Contact us to opt out. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from Slack global models, you can opt out. To opt out, please have your Org or Workspace Owners or Primary Owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com with your Workspace/Org URL and the subject line “Slack Global model opt-out request.” We will process your request and respond once the opt out has been completed.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#286
Products that have search, autocomplete, etc… use rankers that are trained on System Metadata to build the core experience.

Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc… all do the same thing under the hood.

Nobody is pumping the text into an LLM training. The examples make this very clear as well.

Comment section here is divorced from reality.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#287
To add some nuance to this conversation, what they are using this for is Channel recommendations, Search results, Autocomplete, and Emoji suggestion and the model(s) they train are specific to your workspace (not shared between workspaces). All of which seem like they could be handled fairly privately using some sort of vector (embeddings) search.

I am not defending Slack, and I can think of number of cases where training on slack messages could go very badly (ie, exposing private conversations, data leakage between workspaces, etc), but I think it helps to understand the context before reacting. Personally, I do think we need better controls over how our data is used and slack should be able to do better than "Email us to opt out".

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#288
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are these kinda things opt-out? And need to be discovered.. We're literally discussing switching to Teams at my company (1500 employees)

If you switch to Teams only for this reason I have some bad news for you - there’s no way Microsoft is not (or will not start in future) doing the same. And you’ll get a subpar experience with that (which is an understatement).

I would guess Microsoft has a lot more government customers (and large customers in general) than Slack does. So I would think they have a lot more to loose if they went this route.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be better off just not having chat than switching to Teams.

But the business will suffer by most likely being less successful due to less cohesive communication.. it's "The Ick" either way.

I'm not sure chat apps improve business communications. They are ephemeral, with differing expectations on different teams. Hardly what I'd label as "cohesive"

Async communications are critical to business success, to be sure -- I'm just not convinced that chat apps are the right tool.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#290
post #173

It seems like we've entered an era where not only are you paying for software with money, you're also paying for software with your data, privacy implications be damned. I would love to see people picking f/oss instead.

Problems with f/oss for business applications: 1. Great UX folks almost never work for free. So the UX of nearly all OSS is awful. 2. Great software comes from a close connection to users. When your software is an OS kernel that works just fine for programmers, but how many OSS folks want to spend their free time on zoom talking to hundreds of businesses and understanding their needs, so they can give them free softw…

The good news for FOSS is that the UX of most commercial software is also awful and generally getting worse. The bad news is that FOSS software is copying a lot of the same UX trends.
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