Because Grok is so open and relatively uncontrolled, the AI assistant has been caught spreading false information about the US election. Election officials from Minnesota, New Mexico, Michigan, Washington and Pennsylvania sent a letter of complaint to Musk after Grok provided false information about voting deadlines in their states.
Grok quickly answered this question. The AI chatbot will now say “for accurate and up-to-date information about the 2024 US election, please visit Vote.gov” when asked election-related questions, according to The Verge.
But X also makes it clear that it’s the user’s responsibility to judge the AI’s accuracy. “This is an early version of Grok,” xAI says on its help page. Therefore, the chatbot can “confidently provide factually incorrect information, mis-generalize, or miss some context,” xAI warns.
“We encourage you to independently verify any information you receive,” xAI adds. “Please do not share personal data or sensitive and confidential information in your conversations with Grok.”
Grok Data Collection
The massive amounts of data collection is another area of concern – especially since you’ve automatically opted in to share your X data with Grok, whether you use the AI assistant or not.
The Grok Help Center page describes how xAI “may use your X posts, as well as your user interactions, inputs, and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes.”
Grok’s training strategy has “significant privacy implications,” says Marius Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN. Beyond the AI tool’s “ability to access and analyze potentially personal or sensitive information,” added Briedis, there are additional concerns “given the AI’s ability to generate images and content with minimal moderation.”
While Grok-1 was trained on “publicly available data until Q3 2023” but was not “pre-trained on X data (including public X posts),” according to the company, Grok-2 was explicitly trained on all “posts , interactions, inputs and outputs’ of X users, each automatically opting in, says Angus Allen, senior product manager at CreateFuture, a digital consultancy specializing in AI implementation.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is specific about obtaining consent for the use of personal data. In this case, xAI may have “overlooked this for Grok,” Allen says.
