Because Slack wasn’t already annoying enough to use.
SlackGPT
Salesforce is bringing OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to Slack, yet another sign that the compulsively lying and hallucinating AI assistant is becoming inescapable in everyday life.
Salesforce, which bought the popular communication app back in 2021, will allow users to take advantage of OpenAI’s blockbuster AI inside Slack to summarize conversations, research topics, and even draft replies.
None of that is exactly surprising, considering workers have already started using the tool to do exactly that before it was integrated into Slack.
The tool, which is currently in beta, is meant to allow users to “get up to speed faster on channels or threads,” “instantly find answers,” and “draft messages in seconds,” according to a press release.
“There couldn’t be a more natural fit,” Slack chief product officer Noah Desai Weiss said. “This will give customers new superpowers by helping them tap the collective knowledge of their organization’s channel archives.”
AI Chaos
But while these AI tools may appear to be impressively good at condensing information or generating boilerplate emails, they’re still far from perfect. For one, ChatGPT is known to make stuff up on the spot.
Its tendency to “hallucinate” and draw purported facts out of thin air could make it a tool of great frustration and confusion in a workplace that relies on Slack as a central place for communication.
Salesforce isn’t stopping at ChatGPT in its quest to lure investors with its commitment to AI (or firing thousands of workers while paying Matthew McConaughey $10 million a year).
The company also launched an AI tool dubbed Einstein GPT, which it claims is the “world’s first generative AI customer relationship management (CRM) technology, which “can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers” or “generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates.”
In other words, companies are about to be flooded with AI-generated marketing sales pitches, a dystopian nightmare for those, who are already drowning in a daily flood of emails.
All things considered, an unhinged, biased, and error-prone AI chatbot wreaking havoc on Slack seems like a big gamble. It remains to be seen if workers will find a use for the tool — or decide to hit the mute button instead.
READ MORE: Salesforce enters the generative AI race [Axios]
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