Live data from Hacker News

Slack AI Training with Customer Data

slack.com

221–230 of 426 posts

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#221
post #21

How could this possibly comply with European "right to be forgotten" legislation? In fact, how could any of these AI models comply with that? If a user requests to be forgotten, is the entire model retrained (I don't think so).

This "ai" scam going on now is the ultimate convoluted process to hide sooo much tomfuckery: theres no such thing as copyright anymore! this isn't stealing anything, its transforming it! you must opt out before we train our model on the entire internet! (and we still won't spits in our face ) this isn't going to reduce any jobs at all! (every company on earth fires 15% of everyone immediately) you must return to offi…

[flagged]

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#222
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Data will not leak across workspaces. 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, memorize, or be able to reproduce some part of Customer Data. I feel like that is explicitly what this is saying.

The problem is, it's really really hard to guarantee that. Yes if they only train say, classifiers, then the only thing that can leak is the classification outcome. But these things can be super subtle. Even a classifier could leak things if you can hack the context fed into it. They are really playing with fire here.

If is also hard to guarantee that, in a multi-tenant application, users will never see other users' data due to causes like mistakes AuthZ logic, caching gone awry, or other unpredictable situations that come up in distributed systems—yet even before the AI craze we were all happy to use these SaaS products anyway. Maybe this class of vulnerability is indeed harder to tame than most, but third-party software has never been without risks.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#223
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 think a self hosted matrix/irc/jitsi is the way to do it.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#224

Good we moved to matrix already. I just hope they start putting more emphasis on Element X, which message handling is broken on iOS for weeks now.

Element X is where all the effort is going, and should be working really well. How is msg handling broken?

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#225
post #43

> 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…

The problem is this also covers very reasonable use cases.

Use sampling across messages for spam detection, predicting customer retention, etc - pretty standard.

Then there's cases where you could have models more like llms that can output data from the training set but you're running them for that customer.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#226
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need to reword this. Whoever wrote it is a liability Sounds like it’s been written specifically to avoid liability.

I'm sure it was lawyers. It's always lawyers.

Yes, lawyers do tend to have a part to play in writing things that present a legally binding commitment being made by an organisation. Developers really can’t throw stones from their glass houses here. How many of you have a pre-canned spiel explaining why the complexities of whichever codebase you spend your days on are ACTUALLY necessary, and are certainly NOT the result of over-engineering? Thought so.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#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 switching to Slack from Teams. I gave him a glowing recommendation because it is literally night and day, but there is no way in hell he takes any chance any sensitive legal discussions leak out through prompt hacking. He might even be liable himself for knowingly using a tool that spells out "we read and reuse your conversations".

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#228
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…

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.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#229
post #103
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…

I’d be surprised if more 1% opt out.

I'd be surprised if any legal department in any company with one will not freak the f out when they read this. They will likely loose the biggest customers first, so even if it is 1% of customers, it will likely affect their bottom line enough to give it a second though. I don't see how they might profit from an in-house LLM more than from their enterprise-tier plans.

Their customer support will have a hell of a day today.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#230
So if you want to opt out, there's no setting to switch, you need to send an email with a specific subject:

> Contact us to 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.” [...]

Post reply on HN