Internet X bows to European data protectionists during AI training
Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok will no longer be trained in Europe with user data from his online platform X without being asked, following the intervention of data protectionists. A lawsuit in this context is off the table.
04.09.2024, 20:06
SDA
X had initially suspended the evaluation of the data in August. The Irish data protection authority withdrew its complaint against the Twitter successor service on Tuesday.
Grok is 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 with publicly available posts from X users. Their permission was not obtained in advance - they were merely given the opportunity to object to the use of their posts in the settings.
The move prompted data protectionists to argue that the explicit consent of users would have been required first. Following the complaint by the Irish data protection authority, X suspended the evaluation of the data and no longer used 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.
The Irish data protection authority also initiated a broader debate on the regulation of access to user information for the training of software models based on artificial intelligence.
