"Elon Musk's X may be in breach of Australian privacy law over data harvesting for Grok AI", 31 July 2024

Australia's privacy watchdog says social media platform X (formerly Twitter) may be in breach of Australian privacy law after it emerged users were automatically opted in to having their posts used to build artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

...an X user pointed out the X app privacy settings includes a pre-ticked box that permits X to use the account holder's posts to train the Grok AI chatbot built by Elon Musk's company xAI.

The default setting states that you "allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning".

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In recent months, it also emerged other platforms, such as Meta and Slack, were harvesting user data to train AI as part of a global race to build bigger and better large language models (LLMs).

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X hasn't commented on the controversy.

Its Safety team tweeted that "all X users have the ability to control whether their public posts can be used to train Grok, the AI search assistant."