If you’re an X/Twitter user, take a second to tweak this setting. It turns out many user posts have been automatically opted-in for training Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor.
Twitter has automatically opted us all in as training data for Grok.
Turn it off asap.
Settings / Privacy / Grok pic.twitter.com/yKhpowuehH
— cassandra, heresiarch of sleep (@replygirlsystem) July 26, 2024
Several users, including open-source intelligence analyst Oliver Alexander, noticed the change and alerted the public. “X has now enabled data sharing by default for every user, which means you consent to them using all your posts, interactions and data on here to train Grok and share this data with xAI,” he said in a post on X.
If you don’t want X hoovering up every little interaction you have to train its terminally online large language model, you need to opt-out. Users can only do this from the website, the setting isn’t present on either the Android or iPhone X app.
Tap the three dots in the bottom left of the screen then select “Privacy and safety” from the menu that pops up. Scroll down to the “Data sharing and personalization” tab. At the bottom of that list is a setting for Grok. Click it and you should see a checkbox. Make sure that checkbox is empty and you’re good to go.
LLMs are hungry for training data. They need more and more fresh, human-generated, interactions to better hone in on replicating normal written patterns. “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,” the explanation below the checkbox said. “This also means that your interactions, inputs, and results may also be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes.”
It makes sense that Grok would use posts on X as training data, but it’s polite to ask. It’s unclear when X opted everyone into training Grok and the company did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Grok and xAI are at the center of Musk’s plans for the future. After a dire quarterly earnings report for Tesla this week, he floated the idea of investing $5 billion from the company into xAI. He told investors that xAI is critical to the advancement of self-driving cars and data centers and that he wanted to integrate Grok into Tesla’s software.
