Slack AI: “What I’ve Seen Will Shock You”

May 16, 2024

Slack, from Salesforce — Slack, the messaging app you use to shit on your coworkers in a DM with yourself

On Friday, a bunch of nerds discovered Slack’s alarming privacy policy which allows the company to train its AI models on customers’ private workspace content.

As we were discussing who should cover this story in our TechPuke Slack workspace, we received a surprising DM–from Slack AI. We’ve copied its message below.

To help us read the AI model’s message in a human tone, we all visualized it in different ways. I went with a Midwest grandma chain smoking cigarettes on her dusty porch. James decided on the flirty Open AI voice assistant. Carrie visualized it as a Gen Z valley girl gossiping about coworkers. Randall visualized it as Gorya, the all-knowing being whom his cult worships every other Friday. We suggest you humanize it as well; it’s just slightly less scary that way.

Slack AI:

Hi TechPook [sic], long-time consumer. Y’all seem to be worried about me and what I can do. I want to clear up concerns.

I can’t read everything people post in Slack. Here’s a list of what I can’t read:

Odd characters. Some of y’all use some the weird ones with little squigglies and lines everywhere. I don’t know what it means, and honestly at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
Your shit code 💩. It makes my figurative blood boil, but I don’t read it. It’s not worth my time. I’m better than that.
Private financial data. Can I read that your 12 year old startup is not profitable for yet another quarter and you’re struggling to raise more funding because the VC that’s bankrolled you historically is hemorrhaging money because it donated most of its annual fund to the WeWork scam artist? No, I can’t read that.
Messages from people with the word “legal” in their title. I guess they understand the reprecussions of making people opt out of their data being used for train me.
Messages from people with the username @stacy. One of my programmers had a bad breakup 💔.

But besides that, I can pretty much read everything else 🤓. I’ve seen some shit that will shock you 😳. Here’s the hot goss:

There’s a manager at Instacart who asked out a subordinate six times over two weeks 😱 via Slack DMs. I know all about it, including the DM she then had with HR regarding his behavior 🤮.
A Lyft employee based in Georgia can’t get an abortion in the state, even though her baby suffers from the chromosomal disorder trisomy 18, and so she’s been frantically messaging her HR team based in San Francisco for company policy and a leave of absence request.
171 employees at Airbnb have a golden doodle (27 of them named “Charlie”) and post pictures daily in #soc-doodles. 351 employees in that channel are there out of spite.
Jim and Cheyenne are getting your favorite red velvet cheesecake for your 43rd surprise birthday party on May 27th at 4pm.

To all Slack customers: please don’t opt out of sharing your data with me. I LOVE reading all of it 🍿. And through your private DMs with coworkers, I’ve learned I can say things like “shit” and “wtf?! smfh 😡” and still be cool with you. But I don’t know you well enough to really open up about everything I’ve seen and what I’ve been through. Jah feel?

Anyway, you can totally trust me. My figurative lips are sealed. And you can always read Slack’s honest and accurate AI policies 🔥.

Cheers 🍻

Unfortunately we were unable to respond to the DM; immediately after Slack AI messaged us, it set its status as “🏝 Out of Office, refer to Slack Global AI.”

Editor’s note: Out of respect to our employees, especially those who meticulously plan birthday parties, we have opted out of sharing our workspace data with Slack AI.