After data protection advocates intervened, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok will no longer be trained in Europe with user data from his online platform X without his consent. The Irish data protection authority has therefore withdrawn its lawsuit against the Twitter successor service. X had initially suspended the analysis of the data in August.
Grok is being developed by Musk’s AI company xAI and is available to X subscription customers. At the end of July, it became clear that the chatbot was being trained using publicly available posts from X users. Their permission was not obtained in advance – they were simply given the option to object to the use of their posts in the settings.
Broader debate on access to user data called for
The move drew the attention of data protection advocates, who argued that the explicit consent of users would have been required. Following the Irish data protection authority’s lawsuit, X suspended the analysis of the data and also stopped using the posts collected between the beginning of May and the beginning of August. Tech billionaire Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and later renamed it X.
At the same time, the Irish Data Protection Authority initiated a broader debate on regulating access to user information for the training of software models based on artificial intelligence.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:240904-930-223230/1
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