Will Discord’s Conversation Summaries Get Binned Like Clyde?

Discord, one of the world’s leading messenger apps, has taken a “dynamic” approach to implementing AI-powered features, announcing and gradually releasing them back in 2023, with many being scaled or rolled back since.?

Discord is not alone in the category of “tech companies speeding to ship AI” – in fact, most platforms that have integrated AI have faced significant legal and public backlash.

Twitter / X recently gave themselves permission to leverage user data for AI training, LinkedIn have been sued for doing the same, allegedly without consent, while Meta have been accused of unethical training practices. We’re likely to see more of these cases crop up, especially with the current US administration rolling back AI protections, and ramping up investment.?

Lets dig into Discord’s AI features, where they started, where they are now – and what it means for your digital privacy.

Conversation Summaries

Conversation summaries use AI to group messages together into topics, giving users a quick overview of discussions in a channel – sounds useful! But in reality, summaries pose a number of issues for the privacy-conscious user.

YouTube channel No Text To Speech dug into the network activity of AI summaries, and found that they preserve information about which users discussed certain topics even after the relevant messages have been deleted. You can watch the full video here – not only did Discord manage to create a vulnerability for socially engineered attacks, but they also broke their own Terms of Service with this feature!

If you moderate a Discord server, and wish to respect the privacy of your members – we recommend disabling this feature altogether.

Clyde (March – December 2023)

Clyde was an AI-powered chatbot, which managed to survive for under one year before Discord disabled the feature. The Verge cites the reason for its shutdown as “unclear”, while PCMag published the announcement with no explanation outside Clyde being an “experiment”.

No Text To Speech’s coverage, however, highlighted the bots history of slurs, hate speech, promiscuous messages, and aiding scammers. Not to mention Clyde’s history of sharing recipes for napalm and meth, and assuming the identity of a user’s late grandma.?

Perhaps these reasons might have something to do with Clyde’s incredibly rapid demise?

What Does This Mean For You?

When a company you trust announces an AI feature – you should understand the network activity it relies on to function. DeepSeek was found exposing data recently, in addition to Discord’s Conversation Summaries – while the nature of the vulnerability was different, the principle is the same. This is critical for any AI feature that handles or accesses personal information.?

As AI continues to see more rapid adoption, platforms like Discord may re-implement old AI features with new back-end technology, and add new features altogether.?

Instead of waiting for time to tell what the implications will be, you should get your digital footprint under control today. Clearing old messages and content out of your inboxes and accounts can reduce the impact of platforms leveraging your data for AI, and reduce attack surfaces for hackers and scammers targeting you or your family.

Reviewing your platforms and inboxes (that might be years old) is a time-consuming, tedious process – unless you use Redact.dev – the only app that lets you mass-delete content from Discord and almost all major platforms.?

Naturally, you should also consider disabling features in Discord’s Data & Privacy Settings. If you’re looking to opt out of data use in more apps – check out our AI Opt-Out guides here.