Earlier this week, Billionaire Elon Musk took to his X (formerly Twitter) platform to announce that his xAI company has started training it’s Grok LLM using “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world.” Musk indicated the AI model would be “the world’s most powerful AI by every metric by December this year.” Window’s Central reported.
But as it now seems, Grok AI will need a little bit more than “the most powerful cluster in the world” for it’s training. According to a spot by @EasyBakedOven on X,”Twitter just activated a setting by default for everyone that gives them the right to use your data to train grok.” But, perhaps, more strangely, the social media platform quietly rolled out the feature enabled by default and uses your data to train Grok.
According to Windows Central, the X sleuth indicated that it’s impossible to disable the feature via the mobile app. However, it’s possible to disable the feature via the web app, through it’s hidden.
It’s evident X wants to use your data to make Grok more efficient and effective, which could be a possible explanation why the features shipped under the wraps and is enabled by default. What’s more, X isn’t making it easy for the average user to disable the feature.
TechCrunch reported X, formerly known as Twitter, has automatically activated a setting that allows the company to train its Grok AI on users’ posts. X enabled the new setting by default. The good news is that you can switch it off and also delete your conversation history with the AI.
If the setting is turned on, X can “utilize your X posts as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes,” according to the platform’s settings page. X goes on to note that “this also means that your interactions, inputs, and results may be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes.”
TechCrunch provided the following information on how to switch off X’s data sharing settings:
1 Open up the Settings page on X on your desktop
2 Select the “Privacy and safety” button
3 Select “Grok.”
4 Uncheck the box
After you have switched off the setting, you can delete your conversation history (if any) with the AI by clicking on the “Delete conversation history” button.
X isn’t the only social network that has utilized user data to train its AI, as Meta notified EU and U.K. users last month of an upcoming change that would allow it to use public content on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI. The company eventually bowed regulatory pressure and paused its plans.
ArsTechnica reported Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on user’s data, and that’s opt-out, not opt-in. If you’re an X users, that means Grok is already being trained on your posts if you haven’t explicitly told it not to.
Over the past day or so, users of the platform noticed the checkbox to opt out of this data usage in X’s privacy settings. The discovery was accompanied by outrage that user data was being used this way to begin with.
In my opinion, I’m not certain that this decision — to gather up posts made by the people who currently have X accounts — and feed those posts to Grok — is legal. It feels very sketchy to me, especially since Elon Musk seems to have tried to hide this new “feature.”