Elon Musk’s X Default Setting Lets Posts Train His AI Chatbot Grok, But Users Can Opt Out

Elon Musk‘s X has implemented a default setting for user posts and interactions on the social media platform to be used to help train A.I. chatbot Grok.

“Allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning,” the setting language reads.

The scheme does come with an option enabling users to opt out of the process, however.

While the default setting will automatically capture content for Grok, “all X users have the ability to control whether their public posts can be used to train Grok, the AI search assistant,” the company wrote Friday in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “This setting is available on the web platform and will soon be rolled out on mobile.”

Making accounts private can also prevent users’ material from being fed to Grok, the post noted.

Rolled out to premium subscribers on X last fall, Grok is an AI chatbot in the mold of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and part of AI startup xAI, which Musk also owns.

Musk paid $44 billion in 2022 to acquire Twitter and take it private. The deal, which was by far the most lucrative offer for the social media firm, stemmed from Musk’s frustration with content moderation and other policies at Twitter at the time. In the nearly two years since, he has slashed the staff and rolled out various monetization plans, including a premium subscription tier.

While Musk has expressed optimism for AI as a key part of his business empire, which also includes SpaceX, he also signed an open letter in 2023 warning of the risks of AI. The letter, whose 1,800 signatories included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and a range of other highly pedigreed scientists, called for a six-month pause on development of systems more potent than OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. called for a six-month pause on the development of systems “more powerful” than that of GPT-4. Engineers from Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Meta and Microsoft also joined the coalition, though some later backtracked.