Elon's X Secretly Uses Your Tweets to Train Its Grok AI Model: How to Disable the Function
Recently, several users noticed that X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, modified its data settings to allow automatic participation in training its new AI model, Grok. This update places users in a new category within the data sharing, privacy, and sharing settings, identified as Grok, Musk’s generative AI model. This is prepared by SSP.
The platform prompts users about sharing their posts, interactions, inputs, and results to "train and fine-tune" Grok. While opting out is possible by unchecking a box in settings or setting accounts to private, this is currently restricted to the desktop version, with mobile app options planned for future implementation.
X Premium and Premium+ subscribers can utilize Grok for enhanced search capabilities. According to X’s Help Center, Grok is intended to aid searches while keeping users entertained and engaged. This development follows Musk's declaration of training Grok to be "the most powerful AI in the world," initiated 19 days post-installation using American supercomputers.
Musk's team, xAI, first trained Grok on publicly available text data, intending its training on X data to bolster understanding of human language, humor, and political neutrality. However, concerns have arisen because while a help page describing how to opt out has been available since May, X did not clearly notify users, effectively opting them in without explicit consent.
To prevent your tweets from contributing to Grok's training, access Grok data sharing settings via web and uncheck the relevant box, as this setting is not currently available on mobile apps. X emphasizes that Grok only uses data from public accounts, not private ones.
When it first launched, X promoted Grok's potential for employing real-time platform information, particularly users’ tweets. However, automatic data sharing and the platform's potential inaccuracies raise concerns about training quality and data privileges in AI development practices.