Slack AI

I wonder how long it will be until we hear about a company accidentally doing something because the Slack AI summary / AI search incorrectly paraphrased a request.

I really wish AI companies would call hallucinations what they really are - Mistakes. Using wishy-washy words like that make non-techy people trust outputs of LLMs much much more than they should. "Oh it just hallucinated - how silly!" instead of "It got it wrong - we should be more careful". Can be scary hearing how much trust the average joe puts into LLM outputs...

How far off are we from the Trough of Disillusionment again? When this bubble pops it's going to be rough.

I’ve been using this for a couple months now.

Honestly it’s the kind of thing that’s cool the first time you use it, then I forgot it existed and now it’s nothing more than 1 more notification to clear out every day.

The “Recap” feature has potential but I honestly feel like it creates more noise. In most cases (for me) it’s easier to just skim the channel than to read a summary.

The “ask questions in search” sounded cool, but after a few lackluster attempts at using it I forgot the feature existed.

As the Slack, Google Workspace, and Notion admin at our company, I bought the AI license add-ons for each product (plus ChatGPT) which comes to about $80/person/month.

My thinking is I’ll give our team access to everything bleeding edge for 12 months, then actually ask people what value they get from it and decide whether to scale the licenses back.

I have a feeling many other companies buy these add-ons with a similar mindset.

I find that landing page over-produced and trying too hard to the extent that I literally couldn't read it. 2000s era pop-up vibes.

Slack must be happy that AI + LLMs came at a moment where the novelty of their product seemed to be wearing off, and similarly to how people now think about email, Slack seems to (sadly, in my opinion) be gaining a reputation as a place for noise, busywork, and distraction. AI can solve those problems (a second time, as Slack was designed to make workplace communication more efficient).

Hmm. None of these features seem to be particularly useful. If a channel has so many unread messages that you need a summary of it, maybe try just not. I don't want a daily round-up from multiple channels - I want Slack to just show me messages from multiple low-volume channels in a single view.

Related:

Slack AI Training with Customer Data

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383978

Man, it has got to suck being a fresh out of school CS grad. Not only is the industry fucked, if you get a job, you may well be fully remote and WFH which already kills social connections in the crib. Now add slack AI to the mix and you've got the Black Mirror-esque nightmare of: Has your manager really read your message? Have they ever read any? Or is everything you say just being shouted into an abyss, with only an LLM distorted echo being heard.

Is this the beginning of the end of Slack?

Unrelated: I forgot Slack was owned by Salesforce, who also own Heroku. Why am I still using Slack?

Even if AI tools (e.g. search or summarization) aren't perfect, neither are our current manual methods. Right now I feel there's a strong negative sentiment towards mistakes made by LLMs vs humans - when/if that sentiment fades, it'll be interesting to see how much work can be delegated to LLMs.