Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies (fastcompany.com)

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

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.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-tra... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801494)

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.

Reminds me of the Enron dataset

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