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Slack AI Training with Customer Data

slack.com

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Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#251

Post by blackenedgem »

bee_rider wrote: post #181
rozap wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think I don't shitpost in the #engineering channel? And heuristics don't even scratch the surface of the bigger problem where it's trained on people who aren't great at their jobs but type a lot of words on slack about circling back on KPIs.

I think those types of people are actually shockingly well paid. If slack can make bots to replace them, they’ll print money, right?

That's all well and good until something goes down and you need someone knowledgeable to diplomatically shout at a vendor.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#252

Post by ptman »

We really need to start using self-hosted solutions. Like matrix / element for team messaging.

It's ok not wanting to run your own hardware at your own premises. But the solution is to run a solution that is end-to-end encrypted so that the hosting service cannot get at the data. cryptpad.fr is another great piece of software.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#253

Post by unkulunkulu »

andy_ppp wrote: post #206
metadat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The idea that Slack makes companies work better needs some proof behind it, I’d say the amount of extra distraction is a net negative… but as with a lot of things in software and startups nobody researches anything and everyone writes long essays about how they feel things are.

Distraction is not enforced. Learning to control your attention and how to help yourself do it is crucial whatever you do in whatever time and in whatever technological context or otherwise. It is the most long term valuable resource you have.

I think we start to recognize this at larger scale.

Slack easily saves a ton of time solving complex problems that require interaction and expertise of a lot of people, often unpredictable number of them for each problem. They can answer with delay, in a good culture this is totally accepted and people still can independently move forward or switch tasks if necessary, same as with slower communication tools. You are not forced to answer with any particular lag, however slack makes it possible when needed to reduce it to zero.

Sometimes you are unsure if you need help or you can do smthing on your own. I certainly know that a lot of times eventually I had no chance whatsoever, because knowledge requires was too specialized, this is not always clear. Reducing barriers to communication in those cases is crucial and I don't see Slack being in the way here, only helpful.

The goal of organizing Slack is such that you pay right amount of attention to right parts of communication for you. You can do this if you really spend (hmm) attention trying to figure out what that is and how to tune your tools to achieve that.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#254

Post by notachatbot1234 »

p1esk wrote: post #234
tifik wrote: 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?

Do they discard everything processed so far every time someone opts out?

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#256

Post by ENGNR »

DougBTX wrote: post #203
afc wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 corporate water coolers, where bots and other services routinely send updates and query sensitive internal services.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#257

Post by ellisnguyen »

Can we organize some sort of boycott somehow somewhere? Something in court possible?

This is not just some analytics data or email names, this is potential leakage of secrets and private conversations for thousands of companies and millions of individuals.

Ridiculous.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#259

Post by KronisLV »

tifik wrote: 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…

Personally, I rather liked self-hosted versions of these:

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Out of those, Mattermost was the easiest to setup (just need PostgreSQL and a web server, in addition to the main container), however not being able to easily permanently delete instead of just archiving workspaces was awkward. Nextcloud Talk was very easy to get going if you already have Nextcloud but felt a bit barebones last I checked, whereas Rocket.Chat was overall the more pleasant option to use, although I wasn't the biggest fan of them using MongoDB for storage.

The user experience is pretty good with all of them, however in the groups that I've been a part of, ultimately nobody cared about self-hosting an instance, since most orgs just prefer Teams/Slack (or even Skype for just chatting/meetings) and most informal groups just default to Discord. Oh well.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#260

Post by andy_ppp »

unkulunkulu wrote: post #253
andy_ppp wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that Slack makes companies work better needs some proof behind it, I’d say the amount of extra distraction is a net negative… but as with a lot of things in software and startups nobody researches anything and everyone writes long essays about how they feel things are.

Distraction is not enforced. Learning to control your attention and how to help yourself do it is crucial whatever you do in whatever time and in whatever technological context or otherwise. It is the most long term valuable resource you have. I think we start to recognize this at larger scale. Slack easily saves a ton of time solving complex problems that require interaction and expertise of a lot of people, often u…

That’s a lot of words with no proof isn’t it, it’s just your theory. Until I see a well designed study on such things I struggle to believe the conjecture you make either way. It could be quite possible that you benefit from Slack and I don’t.

Even receiving a message and not responding can be disruptive and on top I’d say being offline or ignoring messages is impossible in most companies.

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