You know how sometimes a company collects so much of your personal info it feels a bit creepy? Well, it seems Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) might be doing just that, and some privacy groups are ringing alarm bells with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the agency that protects consumers.
These advocates are concerned that X's new AI model, called Grok, is being trained on all the public posts people share on the platform. Think of it like a chef learning to cook by tasting every single dish in a giant restaurant, including all your personal recipes you unknowingly left out. If Grok is using all your tweets, pictures, and conversations to get smarter, that's a huge pot of personal data.
This matters because X has a history of not always being super careful with user data, and training Grok on everyone's public posts could lead to unexpected uses of your information. While other AI companies like Google (with Gemini) or OpenAI (with GPT) also train their models on vast amounts of data, the specific concern here is X’s track record and the sheer volume of personal, often sensitive, public data on its platform.
So, what should you do? Just be mindful of what you share publicly on X, or any social media for that matter. Assume anything you post could be used to train an AI, and consider adjusting your privacy settings if you’re concerned.
Your online posts are data points, so share wisely.