A Discord community for gay gamers is in disarray after one of its moderators and an executive at Anthropic forced the company’s AI chatbot on the Discord, despite protests from members.
Users voted to restrict Anthropic’s Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.
Archive: http://archive.today/Hl7TO
It’s crazy how many communities and products are chasing their own users away by introducing AI. How many online spaces do we have to flee? I feel like an internet refugee, always running away and trying to find shelter from the clankers. Like that meme of the girl hiding from the robot under the desk, like “please don’t come over here”
Edit: to take this further, an adjacent problem with different reasons for concern is the unannounced surveillance that feeds bots that don’t directly interact with the community. We may feel like Winston and Julia in their cottage before they learned that there was a telescreen in the room but out of sight, and it had presumably always been there. How can we be sure that our safe spaces are safe from unannounced surveillance?