X, the social network formerly known as Twitter owned by mega-billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, has turned on a setting indicating it intends to use its millions of users’ posts and interactions to train Grok, the AI assistant developed by another one of Musk’s companies.
“To continuously improve your experience, we may utilize your X posts as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes,” says a notice on X’s settings web page. “This also means that your interactions, inputs, and results may also be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes.”
X users can opt out of having their data collected for Grok. The setting is available on the web but not on the mobile app at this point. Users can uncheck the box to opt out of the feature; in addition, there’s an option to delete your Grok conversation history.
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A post on X’s help site titled “about Grok, Your Humorous AI Search Assistant on X” says that “Like most LLMs today, Grok-1 was pre-trained by xAI on a variety of text data from publicly available sources from the Internet up to Q3 2023 and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers. Grok-1 has not been pre-trained on X data (including public X posts).”
According to the article, Grok uses X posts and user interactions, inputs and results “to train and enhance the system’s performance,” allowing xAI to “enhance Grok’s understanding of human language and communication,” as well as “develop Grok’s sense of humor and wit to make interactions more enjoyable” and “ensure Grok remains politically unbiased and provides balanced answers.” The post also notes that users can opt-out of having their data collected for Grok.
Earlier this week, Musk announced that his xAI artificial-intelligence company had started training the Grok large language model (LLM) using “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world.” He claimed the AI model would be “the world’s most powerful AI by every metric by December this year.”
Currently, the Grok AI feature is available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, who can conduct searches and get answers using Grok, “as an enhancement of X’s search functions.”
Musk officially closed the debt-laden deal to acquire Twitter in October 2022 — which he did reluctantly after Twitter sued to hold him to his original $44 billion takeover offer. In July 2023, Musk unilaterally rebranded Twitter as X, after earlier announcing that he was going to change Twitter into X, “the everything app.” Earlier this year the company retired the twitter domain name in a full move to x.
