Regulators are not happy.
Sharing Is Caring
At some point, X-formerly-Twitter auto-opted its users into sharing their data with Grok, owner Elon Musk’s unfunny “anti-woke” chatbot — without bothering to tell users about the change.
Flagged by Rolling Stone‘s Noah Shachtman, it remains unclear when X introduced this so-called “data sharing” change that authorizes the social network to use your tweets to train Musk’s shoddy ChatGPT competitor.
As Shachtman notes, opting out of having your data included in Grok’s training pool is as simple as de-selecting the allowance in your settings.
Nevertheless, it’s super sketchy that everyone was automatically opted in without being informed, and that nobody knows how long this has been going on.
Forgiveness, Not Permission
Beyond not informing users that it’s using their data, X also appears to not have told regulators about the change, either.
In a statement to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which acts as X’s European watchdog, said the agency was taken by surprise when it learned that the social network had automatically opted users into allowing their tweets to be used as AI training data.
“The DPC has been engaging with X on this matter for a number of months, with our latest interaction occurring as recently as yesterday,” Graham Doyle, the DPC’s deputy commissioner, told the site. “Therefore we are surprised by today’s developments.”
As TechCrunch notes, European Union law requires companies to have a valid legal reason to process data — and per the brief explanation provided under the “data sharing” tab in X user settings, such reasoning is unclear.
The watchdog said it had followed up with X about the change and that it’s waiting for “further engagement” on the matter.
With this brewing debacle, X has become the latest in a string of companies to scrape data without asking. It’s also not the first to automatically opt users into data sharing as a means of ass-covering — and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last.
More on AI training: When AI Is Trained With AI-Generated Data, It Starts Spouting Gibberish
