Elon Musk’s social media platform X is training its AI chatbot Grok with your data, but it’s an opt-out, not an opt-in, thing: If you’re an X user, Grok is already trained on your posts unless you explicitly tell it not to.
Over the past day or so, users of the platform have noticed that there is a checkbox in X’s privacy settings to opt out of this data use, a discovery that has been accompanied by outrage that user data was being used in this way.
Social media posts about this sometimes seem to suggest that Grok has just started training with X user’s data, when in fact the user has no idea how long it has been going on.
Today, X’s Safety account tweeted that “all X users can control whether their public posts can be used to train Grok, our AI search assistant,” but did not say when the option became available or when the data collection began.
Currently, it can’t be disabled on the mobile app, but you can disable it on the mobile web, and X says the option will be coming to the app soon.
On the privacy settings page, X says:
To continually improve your experience, we may use your X-Posts and user interactions, inputs and results on Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes, which also means that your interactions, inputs and results may be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes.
X’s privacy policy has allowed this since at least September 2023.
It’s becoming increasingly common for user data to be used in this way: Meta, for example, does the same thing with users’ content, and when Adobe updated its terms of service to allow this sort of thing, it sparked an outcry. (Adobe quickly backtracked, promising that it would “never” train generative AI on creators’ content.)
How to Opt Out
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To stop Grok from training X content, first click[その他]From the menu[設定とプライバシー]Go to…
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Then click or tap on “Privacy and Safety”…
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Then “Glok”…
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Finally, uncheck the box.
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While it’s not yet possible to opt out on our iOS or Android apps, you can opt out on mobile or desktop web in a few easy steps.
- Click or tap More in the navigation panel
- Click or tap on Settings and Privacy
- Click or tap on “Privacy and Safety”
- Scroll down and click or tap “Grok” under “Data Sharing and Personalization.”
- Uncheck the “Allow Grok to use your interactions, inputs, and results for training and fine-tuning, not just posts” box, which is on by default.
Alternatively, you can go directly to the settings page with this link and uncheck the box with just one more click. If you’ve used the chatbot before, you can also delete your conversation history with Grok here if you wish.
