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X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, owned by billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk, has turned on a setting that indicates it intends to use the posts and interactions of millions of users to train Grok, an AI assistant developed by another of Musk’s companies.
“To continually improve your user experience, we may use your X posts, and user interactions, inputs, and results on Grok, for training and fine-tuning purposes,” reads a notice on X’s settings webpage. “This also means that user interactions, inputs, and results may be shared with our service provider, xAI, for these purposes.”
X users can opt out of data collection by Grok. This setting is available on the web but not currently on the mobile apps. Users can uncheck a box to opt out of the feature. There is also an option to delete their Grok conversation history.
A post on X’s help site titled “About Grok, X’s Humorous AI Search Assistant” reads: “Like most LLMs today, Grok-1 has been pre-trained by xAI using text data from various sources publicly available on the internet up until Q3 2023, and a data set reviewed and curated by human reviewers – AI Tutors. Grok-1 has not been pre-trained on X data (including publicly available X posts).”
According to the article, Grok uses X’s posts, user interactions, inputs, and results to “train and enhance the system’s performance,” allowing xAI to “enhance Grok’s understanding of human language and communication,” as well as “develop Grok’s sense of humor and wit to make interactions more enjoyable” and “ensure Grok provides politically unbiased and balanced answers.” The article also notes that users can opt out of having their data collected for Grok.
Earlier this week, Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, has begun training the Grok Large Language Model (LLM) using “the world’s most powerful AI training cluster,” which he claimed will “become the world’s most powerful AI by any metric by December of this year.”
The Grok AI feature is currently available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, allowing subscribers to perform searches and get answers using Grok “as an enhancement to X’s search capabilities.”
Musk formalized the deal to buy debt-laden Twitter in October 2022, but reluctantly did so after Twitter filed suit to block the company’s initial $44 billion acquisition offer. In July 2023, Musk unilaterally rebranded Twitter to X, despite announcing that he would change Twitter to X, the “app for everything.” The company has discontinued the twitter.com domain name. Complete migration to x.com.
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