X lets Grok train its AI using your tweets
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Elon Musk’s social network “X” has quietly given permission to use all of its old Twitter posts to train “Grok,” an AI model developed and released by another of Musk’s companies, X.ai, as first spotted by Twitter users.
“Twitter enabled a setting by default that gives Twitter the right to use users’ data to train Grok,” tweeted X-user @EasyBakedOven. “Twitter never announced it.”
On the surface, this is an aggressive, acquisitive move by Musk to boost his AI capabilities. However, Twitter has historically been public and available to the public, so the tweets have likely been used by multiple other AI companies for years.
In fact, I asked ChatGPT whether OpenAI used Twitter data during training.
“Yes, OpenAI uses data from a variety of sources, including publicly available data from social media platforms like Twitter, to train models like ChatGPT,” ChatGPT said, citing a May 2024 post from OpenAI. “OpenAI collects data from public sources on the internet, which may include tweets and other social media content, as part of its training datasets to improve the performance and capabilities of its AI models.”
Meta also uses public posts from Facebook and Instagram to train its AI system.
“Public posts from Instagram and Facebook, including photos and text, were part of the data used to train the generative AI models underlying the features we announced,” Mike Clark, Meta’s director of product management, said in September 2023.
So while quietly enabling a setting that allows all of your Twitter tweets/posts, and interactions with Grok itself, to be used for AI training purposes may seem aggressive and acquisitive, this is pretty much business as usual in the AI field.
If you want to turn this feature off, follow these steps:
Go to X.com on the web (you can’t currently change settings on mobile) Click More under Profile in the left menu bar Click Settings and Privacy Click Privacy and Safety Scroll down to Grok and click it Uncheck the box that says “Allow my Grok posts, interactions, typing, and results to be used for training and fine-tuning”
How to prevent Grok from using X’s posts for training
John Kortzier
Of course, it’s polite to announce the use of data even after the fact, at least that’s what Meta and OpenAI have done in their public statements about AI training data.
But overall, as someone who has unwittingly contributed tens of millions of words to AI training, I’m generally in favor of helping the world get just a little smarter.