In a Thursday night forum post, popular gaming communications platform Discord said it is sunsetting its Clyde AI chatbot in two weeks. Discord did not say why Clyde was being phased out, but said the chatbot was only in beta for a small number of servers.
“Clyde will be deactivated at the end of the month,” Discord said. “By December 1, 2023, users will no longer be able to invoke Clyde in DMs, Group DMs or server chats.”
Discord has not yet responded to Decrypt’s request for comment.
Discord launched Clyde in May 2021 as a way for Discord server members to get answers to questions without the intervention of a human moderator. Clyde is a conversational AI program designed using OpenAI’s suite of AI tools that can interact with users on a server where the chatbot has been enabled.
Well before the advent of AI, Discord has been a playground for bots and other semi-autonomous services. The first Discord bots came online in December 2015 after a group of developers reverse-engineered the Discord API. Since then, bots have been an integral aspect of Discord server life.
Not including Clyde, thousands of bots are active on Discord, many considered part of the standard deployment for a busy server. These include Chipbot, which streams music; MEE6, which provides social media alerts; and IdleRPG, which lets users play games with friends. Discord bots have also helped individuals seeking jobs in the blockchain industry find work.
Though rooted in the gaming community, Discord has also been the platform of choice for blockchain communities and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Once again, bots like Collab Land help Discord moderators verify if a member continues to hold the token or NFT necessary to retain membership in the community.
The communications platform has also become the home of several AI art-generation communities and companies. If anyone wants to use the powerful Midjourney AI platform, a subscription, and a Discord account are necessary after the AI image company shut off its free version due to misuse.
Other Discord AI image generators include LimeWire’s BlueWillow, Pika from Pika Labs, and OpenAI’s Dall-E.
Web3 game developers also utilize AI chatbots on Discord, including Alchemy: Battle for Ankhos, a text-based and turn-based game that uses the Solana blockchain. Alchemy uses generative AI, prompting Midjourney to create “art on demand.”
“Discord has a few advantages for building social games,” Alchemy: Battle for Ankhos Creative Director Alex Finden told Decrypt at SolanaPlayGG last summer. “One of those is that all of the game activities happen in this interactive environment that people are already very comfortable with.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.