Elon Musk’s social platform, X, has raised concerns about privacy and the use of personal data. The company has been allowing Grok, its artificial intelligence tool developed under Musk's guidance, to learn from user posts and interactions. This means that unless we change this newly added setting, we are unwittingly contributing to the training of this AI.
How to prevent Grok from learning from our data on X
Since May 2024, Grok has been using public posts and interaction data on X for its training. Initially, the chatbot was trained with open-source texts from the internet, but it has recently started incorporating user posts and dialogues to improve its response capabilities. X claims that access to real-time public posts allows Grok to provide up-to-date information and delve into a broader range of topics. But not everyone will be comfortable with this.
The setting to allow data for training is enabled by default. Thus, in an effort to keep up with user demands and legal regulations, the X platform has discreetly added an option that lets users decide whether they want their data to be used to train Grok or not. However, we can only modify this setting from the web version of the platform.
If we prefer to maintain our privacy and not contribute to the training of Grok, we can disable this option on X by following these steps:
- Enter the web version of X and select Privacy & Security.
- Under Data sharing and personalization, choose Grok.
- Turn off the option that allows our posts and interactions to be used for the training and enhancement of Grok.
Let's remember again that this setting is not available in the mobile app, which significantly restricts our ability to control our data when using X on mobile devices. Although the platform has been criticized for implementing this option without prior notice and by default, at least providing us with this hidden option to deactivate it is a step towards respecting user privacy in the realm of social media and artificial intelligence.
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