alt.hn

4/17/2026 at 11:34:04 PM

Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies

 https://www.fastcompany.com/91528808/shuttered-startups-are-selling-old-slack-chats-and-emails-to-ai-companies

by doctaj

4/18/2026 at 4:25:24 AM

It’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.

by hyperadvanced

4/18/2026 at 6:28:44 AM

maybe they can use this dataset to advise companies on what NOT to do

by stringfood

4/18/2026 at 1:00:37 AM

I 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.

by sudb

4/18/2026 at 6:38:59 AM

How 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?

by Epa095

4/17/2026 at 11:45:05 PM

I was asked by someone today if there are such startups with COBOL based code bases...

by KuriousCat

4/18/2026 at 3:13:35 AM

Go on.

by DANmode

4/18/2026 at 7:17:08 AM

Startups and COBOL shouldn't be in the same sentence lol.

by fakedang

4/18/2026 at 8:12:02 PM

I 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

by scrubs

4/18/2026 at 5:01:49 PM

Reminds me of the Enron dataset

by mhjkl