Shapes, Inc got mass-terminated by Discord!

Explaining the Discord controversy

Shapes.inc is a platform that allows users to create and host their so-called “Shapes”, which are AI-powered chatbots that are customizable and personalized.

But here’s the deal: Their entire Discord server, once a hub for 10 million members! that created, shared, and talked to these Shapes, got completely wiped by Discord in a mass-takedown campaign. Among the terminated apps are the Shapes bots themselves that users created through the Developer Portal API.

Immediately following Discord’s ban of these bots, the admins quickly responded with a call to action, begging their members into submitting mass-appeals under the reason “Shapes did not train AI models on discord user data and messages":

Allegedly, Shapes violated Discord’s Developer Terms of Service by illegally collecting the messages that users sent to these bots.

Looking back, this “mass-appeal” campaign ended up harming their reputation even more, because, according to users, they wouldn’t have insistently denied those claims so blatantly if they truly hadn’t intended on collecting such data.

Discord later terminated the Discord server itself, as mentioned eariler. Then, the posts became flooding from Shapes members expressing their frustrations.

The community’s perspective

The community’s responses regarding the incidents were mixed. Some members harshly criticized Discord’s perceived overreach when it comes to Discord-hosted projects like these:

Others took a more balanced stance, expressing skepticism regarding Shapes’s claim of “innocency” and mentioning how their questionable data collection practices have definitely played a role in the takedown:

Moving forward

I think this is a massive hit to Shapes Inc’s reputation in the human-AI interaction space, both as a company and as a community. Not only did they handle the situation unprofessionally (instructing clients to appeal in favor of them), but they also didn’t properly report their data collection practices to Discord, as reported by multiple sources. This isn’t a mom-and-pop shop, after all; we’re talking about potentially millions of users who sent private information to these chatbots.