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Elevate Magazine
May 22, 2024

Slack Under Fire for Using Private Messages to Train Its AI

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A storm is brewing among Slack’s upset users after it was revealed that the platform has been using customer data, including messages and files, to train its machine-learning models without explicit consent. 

The workplace collaboration platform uses machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, to enable several in-app features like channel recommendations, search results, autocomplete, and emoji suggestions. However, the company has to draw from users’ Slack messages, uploads, and other content to improve these features. 

The training is opt-out, which means that your personal data will be used by default, and you’ll be required to ask your organisation’s Slack admin to email the company and ask it to stop.

The controversy erupted after Corey Quinn, an executive at cloud computing billing company DuckBill Group, spotted the policy as a part of Slack’s Privacy Principles and posted it on X. 

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Slack replied to Quinn’s post, confirming that the Salesforce-owned firm is scraping users’ private content to train some of its AI-powered tools. It also mentioned that companies or workspace administrators (not individual users) can email to request that their messages and content be excluded from the training dataset.

Slack also published a blog on a Friday evening to clarify how its customers’ data is being utilised. 

“Slack uses industry-standard, privacy-protective machine-learning techniques 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 any customer data of any kind. While customers can opt-out, these models make the product experience better for users without the risk of their data ever being shared. Slack’s traditional ML models use de-identified, aggregate data and do not access message content in DMs, private channels, or public channels.” according to the blog post. 

“Slack’s add-on generative AI product, Slack AI, leverages third-party LLMs. No customer data is used to train LLM models. And we do not develop LLMs or other generative models using customer data.” the company added. 

Slack isn’t the only tech platform that doesn’t opt users out of AI tool training by default. Last year, the website hosting and design platform Squarespace quietly introduced a feature allowing its users to opt out of certain AI crawling tools that scrape web data—though AI crawling is permitted by default.

To opt out of AI crawlers, you have to manually go to Settings > Website > Crawlers > AI Crawlers. However, Squarespace doesn’t guarantee that doing this will completely prevent AI tools from crawling your site’s data.