Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is giving users more control over how their data is used to train its AI chatbot, Grok. However, by default, the platform still collects data for this purpose, so users need to opt out if they don’t want their posts and interactions to be used for AI training.
In an announcement on Friday, the company stated, “All X users can control whether their public posts can be used to train Grok, the AI search assistant.” This setting is currently available on the web platform and will soon be rolled out on mobile devices.
To further protect their data, users can make their X accounts private, which also prevents their data from being used for training.
Grok, an AI chatbot available to premium X subscribers, was launched in November 2023 to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Developed by Musk’s AI startup xAI, Grok has been extensively trained on data scraped from X.
Musk has openly discussed his plans to use X data for Grok’s development. The chatbot already uses real-time information from X posts to summarize news events and answer user queries.
This new option to opt out of Grok training comes as concerns about data privacy and the use of personal information for AI development grow. However, since opting out requires users to manually change their settings, the tension between user privacy and the need for large amounts of data to train powerful AI models remains evident.
