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Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies
- doctaj 7mo agohttps://archive.ph/WTtUo https://archive.ph/WTtUo
- KuriousCat 7mo agoI was asked by someone today if there are such startups with COBOL based code bases...
- sudb 7mo agoI thought it was against Slack's ToS to exfiltrate data like this? Also surely most of a startup's Slack activity is just fluff - is there some amount of preprocessing the AI companies have to do, I wonder.
- Epa095 7mo agoHow is the ToS relevant when the company is already bankrupt (IANAL)? Slack can cancel the customer-relationship with the bankrupt company, but that's it, no?
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoSource: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-tra... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801494)
- hyperadvanced 7mo agoIt’s really funny to train your AI on the data of failed companies. My coworker made a similar joke that if we trained an AI on our data they’d think our core business is helping dumbass users reset their passwords or fixing linting errors.
- stringfood 7mo agomaybe they can use this dataset to advise companies on what NOT to do
- mhjkl 7mo agoReminds me of the Enron dataset
- scrubs 7mo agoI can't believe what I just read! ... if only material waste (plastic garbage etc.) was this recyclable we'd be a bit more like nature: self balancing and efficient