Irish watchdog ‘surprised’ over X move on user data

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has expressed “surprise” over social media company X’s decision to use user posts to train an AI chatbot.

Users of X, formerly Twitter, expressed outrage after discovering that the company had enabled a system where their posts could be used to train its Grok AI chatbot.

Grok, which is available to X Premium customers, is billed as a humorous enhanced search feature powered by a “state-of-the-art large language model” that was initially trained on publicly available sources.

The company now wants to use user interactions and posts to improve the service.

X users are opted in to the new system by default but can choose to opt out in settings on the web-based app.

When enabled, the setting allows posts on the site as well as interactions with the chatbot to be used for “training”, while the data may also be shared with the xAI partner company.

X has it European headquarters in Dublin, making the DPC its lead regulator in Europe.

In a statement, a spokesman said: “The DPC has been engaging with X on this matter for a number of months, with our latest interaction occurring as recently as yesterday, therefore we are surprised by today’s developments.

“We have followed up with X today and are awaiting a response.

“We expect further engagement early next week.“