How to Prevent X From Training Its AI With Your Messages
It’s easy to forget that X has its own AI chatbot. It’s called Grok and is available to all X Premium subscribers, but that doesn’t mean free X users won’t be able to interact with it. No, we plebs benefit from training Grok at our posts so he can turn around and warm them up for all of Elon Musk’s favorite boys and girls.
It’s unclear how long X trained Grok on our data, but now at least there’s a way to stop it. In a post on the @Safety account today, X wrote that all users now have the ability to determine whether their posts can be used to train Grok, joining the already existing controls that determine whether Grok can be trained based on your interactions with him.
How to prevent Grok from training using your posts
A toggle to turn this feature off (or turn it on, I guess, but why would you want to do that?) is currently available online and “will be available on mobile devices soon.” Find it by clicking here , then uncheck “Allow your messages, as well as your interactions, inputs, and outputs, to be used with Grok for training and fine-tuning.” While there, you can also click on “Delete Conversation History” to delete your past chats with Grok, if any.
In this case, Grok will be prohibited from training at your posts in the future. You can’t let Grok train on your conversations but not on your messages, so it’s an all or nothing choice. Alternatively, you can make your account private, as private accounts are blocked from Grok training by default.
You can also manually get to this option by clicking the three-dot “More” menu in the X sidebar, going to “Settings & Privacy,” then “Privacy & Security,” then “Grok.” Note that even this method currently only works on the web version of X, not the mobile app.
How long has Grok been looking at our data?
It’s entirely possible that this setting could have existed before, judging by an archived version of Grok’s May “About” page (h/t The Verge ), but if so, X didn’t talk about it.
While we’re only now getting the ability to block Grok’s access to our accounts, that doesn’t mean Grok hasn’t looked into them before; we just don’t know the details of what exactly happened behind the scenes. X’s September 2023 privacy policy states, “We may use information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models” so you can come to your own conclusions.