Whats baffling to me is why companies think that when they slap AI on the press release, their customers will suddenly be perfectly fine with them scraping and monetizing all of their data on an industrial scale, without even asking for permission. In a paid service. Where the service is private communication.
I am not pro-exploiting users' ignorance for their data, but I would counter this with the observation that slapping AI on product suddenly makes people care about the fact that companies are monetizing on their usage data. Monetizing on user activity data through opt-out collection is not new. Pretending that his phenomenon has anything to do with AI seems like a play for attention that exploits peoples AI fears. I'…
People care because AI will gladly regurgitate whatever it learns.
Compared to hosting other things? Nothing! It's great. Hosting my own service rather than using a free SaaS solution that is entirely someone else's problem? There's a significant difference there. I've been running Linux servers either professionally or personally for almost 25 years, so it's not like it's a giant problem... but my work has been increasingly non-technical over the past 5 years or so, so even minor h…
Thanks for elaborating! I'm a retired grunt and tech is just a hobby for me. I host my own Gitea with the same challenges, but to me looking up cron patterns etc. is the norm, not the exception, so I don't think much about it.
I contacted support to opt out.. Here is the answer. "Hi there, Thank you for reaching out to Slack support. Your opt-out request has been completed. For clarity, Slack has platform-level machine learning models for things like channel and emoji recommendations and search results. We do not build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce some part of customer data. O…
Just completely disingenuous that they still pretend to care about customer privacy after rolling this out with silent-opt-in and without adding an easy opt-out option in the Slack admin panel.
> 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…
…a choice that’s carefully hidden deep in the ToS and requires a special person to send a special e-mail instead of just adding an option to the org admin interface.
Never more true than with apple. Activating an iphone for example has a screen devoted to how privacy is important! It will show you literally thousands of pages of how they take privacy seriously! (and you can't say NO anywhere in the dialog, they just show you) They are normalizing "you cannot do anything", and then everyone does it.
Which third party does Apple sell your profile to or your data to? What do they do with the content of your emails for advertising? Which credit card networks at which retailers feed that same profile? So it’s certainly “more true” with, well, every other vendor you can buy a phone from in a telco store or big box store.
> Which third party does Apple sell your profile to or your data to?
Seriously, for your sake; don't do this whole "I am the champion of Apple's righteousness" shtick. Apple doesn't care about privacy. That's the bottom line, you lack the authority to prove otherwise.
Make sure you put a period at the end of the subject line. Their quoted text includes a period at the end. Please also scold them for behaving unethically and perhaps breaking the law.
The period is outside the quotes though, are you suggesting we should have the quotes too?
The section from the OP I'm referring to is:
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.
That includes a period before inside the quotes which would suggest a period inside the subject line.
The period is outside the quotes though, are you suggesting we should have the quotes too?
The section from the OP I'm referring to is: 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 o…
There's some shenanigans going on here, of course. The section I was looking at says...
To opt out, please have your org, 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’.
To me it says that they _do_ train global models with customer data, but they are trying to ensure no data leakage (which will be hard, but maybe not impossible, if they are training with it). The caveats are for “local” models, where you would want the model to be able to answer questions about discussions in the workspace. It makes me wonder how they handle “private” chats, can they leak across a workspace? Presuma…
My intuition is that it's impossible to guarantee there are no leaks in the LLM as it stands today. It would surely require some new computer science to ensure that no part of any output that could ever possibly be developed isn't sensitive data from any of the input. It's one thing if the input is the published internet (even if covered by copyright), it's entirely another to be using private training data from corp…
You and many others here are conflating AI and LLMs. They are not the same thing. LLMs are a type of AI model that produce content, and if trained on customer data would gladly replicate them. However, the TOS explictly say that Generative AI models (=LLMs) are taken off the shelf and not retrained on customer data.
Before LLMs exploded a year and a half ago lots of other AI models had been in place for several years in a lot of systems, handling categorization, search results ranking, etc. As they do not generate text or other content, they cannot leak data. The linked FAQ provides several examples of features based on such models, which are not LLMs: for example, they use customer data to determine a good emoji to suggest for reacting to a message based on the sentiment of the message. An emoji suggestion clearly has no potential of leaking customer data.
> For any model that will be used broadly across all of our customers, we do not build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorise, or be able to reproduce some part of Customer Data This feels so full of subtle qualifiers and weasel words that it generates far more distrust than trust. It only refers to models used "broadly across all" customers - so if it's (a) not used "broadly" or (b) only…
Especially when a few paragraphs below they say: > If you want to exclude your Customer Data from helping train Slack global models, you can opt out. So Customer Data is not used to train models "used broadly across all of our customers [in such a way that ...]", but... it is used to help train global models. Uh.
They are quite well differentiating generative AI models, that are not trained on customer data because they could leak customer data, and other types of AI models (e.g. recommendation systems) that do not work by reproducing content.
The examples in the linked page are quite informative of the use cases that do use customer data.