X’s latest AI training opt-out setting draws regulatory scrutiny

The Irish Data Protection Commission, the regulator that oversees X Corp.’s business practices within the European Union, has sent the corporate questions over a newly added privacy setting.

Users of the Elon Musk-owned social network noticed the setting in query earlier today. When it’s enabled for an account, that account’s information could be incorporated into the training dataset of Grok, a big language model series developed by one other Musk-run company. The setting is turned on by default.

The info collection covered by the brand new setting can currently only be disabled on the net version of X. An analogous opt-out option is predicted to reach on the social network’s mobile apps “soon.” It’s unclear whether X began gathering users’ information for AI training purposes before it rolled out the power to show off data collection.

“All X users have the power to manage whether their public posts could be used to coach Grok, the AI search assistant,” X said in an announcement. “This selection is along with your existing controls over whether your interactions, inputs, and results related to Grok could be utilised.”

The Irish Data Protection Commission has sent X questions “looking for clarity” concerning the latest setting, the Financial Times reported today. “It took us by surprise that they were rolling this out,” a spokesperson for the regulator told the paper.

The Grok series of LLMs for which X has began collecting user data is being developed by xAI, a synthetic intelligence enterprise that Musk launched last 12 months. The corporate raised $6 billion in funding at a $24 billion valuation this past May. It’s using a portion of the capital to construct an AI training supercomputer that can feature 100,000 graphics processing units when it becomes fully operational.

Essentially the most advanced LLM within the Grok series, Grok 1.5V, made its debut in April. The model can process not only text input but additionally images. Grok 1.5V achieved a rating of 53.6% on MMMLU, a preferred benchmark for comparing multimodal LLMs, which puts it about five percentage points behind Google LLC’s Gemini Pro 1.5.

X’s AI development push isn’t the one aspect of its business  that has drawn regulatory scrutiny. In keeping with Politico, the Irish Data Protection Commission is investigating the corporate in reference to “a minimum of five cases” of potential regulatory compliance violations. Each case could potentially result in fines equal to as much as 4% of X’s worldwide annual revenue.

Individually, the European Commission is investigating the corporate over its compliance with the EU’s DSA tech regulation. Last month, officials determined that X’s blue checkmarks are deceptive and run afoul of the DSA. The European Commission can also be evaluating whether X is meeting its regulatory obligations to remove illegal user-generated content and supply researchers with access to data about its platform.

Photo: NASA/Wikimedia Commons