Not even a year in operation. Discord has decided to pull the plug on Clyde, its experimental AI chatbot. The service communicated through a note in its support section that Clyde will be “deactivated” by the end of this month and that on December 1st, “users will no longer be able to summon Clyde in direct messages, group direct messages, or server chats.”
Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model, Clyde started operating earlier this year with the goal of gradually training it to respond to user questions and engage in conversation on Discord. Since then, the chatbot has undergone several limited tests, with the plan of becoming a crucial part of Discord in the future.
However, those plans seem to have been derailed. At the moment, it’s not clear why Discord would have parted ways with Clyde, although the service might reintroduce the chatbot in the future as a feature of Nitro, its subscription-based plan. It’s also possible that Discord has realized Clyde isn’t necessary for its service after these months of testing.
“‘Clyde is an experiment shared with a small percentage of servers,’ Discord’s product communications director, Kellyn Slone, told The Verge. ‘Discord is constantly working to provide users with new features and experiences. Clyde is a continuation of this work, and we look forward to unveiling new user experiences in the future.’
While this may be the end for Clyde, Discord continues to work on various AI-powered features. Among other things, AI enables the service’s users to summarize conversations, create images from text in their virtual whiteboard, and automatically moderate server content through the integration of ChatGPT in AutoMod, its moderation tool.”
