Around 500 customers were increasingly frustrated when they discovered that X was training its AI chatbot, Grok, to respond automatically to their online comments without prior consent. If you’re an X consumer and haven’t explicitly opted out, your posts may already be used to train Grok. Congratulations!
Recent revelations have sparked widespread outrage as customers discovered they had no option to opt out of having their personal data automatically used by X, despite being presented with privacy settings that seemed to offer a choice.
The exact timing of when Grok began exploiting X customers’ data remains unknown. Earlier today, X’s Security account announced that all X customers now have the ability “to govern whether their public posts are used to train Grok”.
Currently, disabling this feature in the mobile app is not possible; therefore, to prevent Grok from posting on your behalf, you must access the setting via the desktop or mobile website of X instead.
To initiate the process, navigate to your menu, tap on it, and locate the option to exit or quit.
X’s privateness settings states:
To continually refine their expertise, leveraging both your X blog posts and consumer interactions, as well as any resulting insights and outcomes from working with Grok’s coaching and fine-tuning features, would be a valuable way to optimize knowledge and skills. By sharing your interactions, inputs, and outcomes with our service provider xAI, this further suggests that the data may also be utilized to enhance the overall performance of the AI system.
As the renowned historian with his distinctive mustache famously remarked: “The theft of a solitary individual’s data is a tragedy; the wholesale plundering of millions’ personal information, however, constitutes a statistical anomaly.” Savor these extra Monday comforting ideas:
