Elon Musk's social media platform, X, is under fire for allegedly using the data of European Union users to train artificial intelligence models without their consent.
What Happened: X, a social media platform owned by Musk, is facing nine privacy complaints from EU users. The platform reportedly used the data of its EU users to train its AI chatbot, Grok, without obtaining their consent, TechCrunch reported on Monday.
The complaints have been filed with data protection authorities in nine EU countries, including Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. The accusations revolve around X's failure to obtain consent for processing EU users' posts for AI training.
Max Schrems, the chairman of privacy rights nonprofit noyb, which is supporting the complaints, stated, "We want to ensure that Twitter fully complies with EU law, which — at a bare minimum — requires to ask users for consent in this case."
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which oversees X's compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has already taken legal action against X for its AI model training. However, noyb argues that the DPC's actions are insufficient.
X Corp, did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comment.
Why It Matters: In late July, users discovered that X had enabled a setting by default that allowed their posts to be used for training Grok, the AI chatbot developed by xAI, a separate venture by Musk. Users could disable this feature through privacy settings, but the default activation without prior notice raised concerns.
Musk emphasized that real-time data from X, Tesla Inc. cars, and Optimus robots would make Grok the "best AI system in the world." He highlighted the importance of having the most potent training compute and improving it rapidly to stay ahead of competitors like OpenAI.
In June, Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research expressed his support for Grok, favoring it over rival platforms. He shared that Grok was the only chatbot that provided a satisfactory response to his query, unlike other chatbots that refused due to content concerns.
Earlier in July, Musk revealed that the upcoming version of Grok would be trained on a staggering 100,000 NVIDIA Corp.'s H100 chips, underscoring the significant resources invested in its development.
