Elon Musk’s X platform is under pressure from data regulators after it emerged that users are consenting to their posts being used to build artificial intelligence systems via a default setting on the app.
The UK and Irish data watchdogs said they have contacted X over the apparent attempt to gain user consent for data harvesting without them knowing about it.
An X user highlighted the issue on Friday, pointing to a setting on the app that activated by default and permitted the account holder’s posts to be used for training Grok, an AI chatbot built by Musk’s xAI business.
Under UK GDPR, which is based on the EU data regulation of the same name, companies are not allowed to use “pre-ticked boxes” or “any other method of default consent”.
The setting, which comes with an already ticked box, states that you “allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning”. According to the X user, the setting can only be turned off on the web version of X.
This is kind of hilarous because, so far, Grok has been a joke in LLM land, and Elon basically lied about his commitment to open sourcing their stuff.
And training an AI on Twitter data? Who thought that was a good idea? That’s just a step above training on 4chan or YouTube comment threads (the former of which is actually a thing).
You’re being very generous to say it’s a, “step above…”.
I dunno, YouTube comments boggle my mind even more than Twitter ones.
4chan is probably better though. The models trained on 4chan data are actually kinda hilarious.