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Discord AI Bot Claims - 21 May 2025

Status: Debunked - Half-Truth

Severity: Low

Suggestion: Disable "Use External Apps" Permission from everyone role and all other roles.(Mitigation)

Community PSA: There is currently no need to warn your community.

Refutation:Discord is not scrapping your images or messages for AI that we know of, and has not partnered with DomoAI to do so; however it has recently disabled the way to get rid of external apps on images making the menu on each image that recommends AI apps impossible to disable.

Source(s): DomoAI's blog post & Discord Dev portal documentation  & Discord "How to Use Apps" documentation

A Shitty situation blown out of proportion due to misunderstandings:

1. Discord does not need to have a bot in a server to collect message intent on their own platform; It is also not part of their ToS. If they wished to use user messages to sell the data to make into a dataset they could do just that and it would make them so much money and they would probably either be secretive about it or announce it on their blog post, from DomoAI's own announcement it's very obvious it's just a bot app like the many others found on discord that has been verified(All bots which are in more than 100 servers must be verified).
2. DomoAI is a small singaporian company which would not have the money to make a deal allowing it to scrape user images or data with one of the biggest chat apps.
3. Domo AI is simply using Discord's bot API to be able to do AI related stuff.
4. Any recommendation to ban the ID of the bot (The bot user of the app) won't do anything because it's not a user within the server. The bot menu cannot be stopped from appearing on each images by server owners but the output of the bot cannot be seen by anyone then the person who authorized it and sent the command to the application.
5. Watermarking your work does not protect you from AI scrapping, using something like Nightshade is much better as it poisons your art to the AI and has minimal repercussions to the art itself.

But I was able to ban the bot; it must stop it right?

Bots cannot be added to servers without explicitly being authorized via the OAuth2 system, The bot is not in a server and does not require to be as it is an app that works on a user level sending messages "Only visible by you". However to utilize this bot the person must first Authorize it to their account. You should still disable "Use External Apps" permission so that external bots cannot send messages or images to your server (It can still send "Only Visible to you" messages for the people using the bot however.)

The real issue here is that discord has not allowed for the ability of the "Use External Apps" permission to disable on a server level the menu that appears on images recommending AI Apps. However, these are still recommendations and to even have the bot do anything it must be added to someone's account via a confirmation window when clicking the recommendation. This however means it is impossible to stop anyone from using these apps to send images on any server to these AI apps to modify them; but it must be done manually.

If you're worried that your art may be scrapped by AI we recommend using: Nightshade on your art before posting it.

Additionally I would recommend you let Discord know that this is not okay on their socials and that you would like to be able to opt-out at either a server level or user level for external apps to affect you.

I have sent a Bug request report just in case it is just a bug and will update with the response here.