Thinking about dropping X? A change implemented last week may help push you toward the exit. The company updated its terms of service on November 15 to officially say it uses public tweets to train its AI.
As PCMag reports, the new doc reads:
“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) [and] you agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including…for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
Simply put, your posts can officially serve as food for X’s Grok chatbot and any other AI systems that X might create in the future.
This practice has been documented at X since the company quietly updated a help file in July to note that your public posts (as well as your interactions with Grok itself) can be used to train X’s AI models. That news, in turn, came a year after Musk revealed that his AI project would be trained on people’s tweets.
It’s unclear whether that language means X will remove the current opt-out option that allows users to disable Grok’s AI scraping. X did not immediately respond to a query emailed to its press-relations address, and a look over Musk’s 100 most recent posts and replies did not reveal further details.
That’s not the only change to X’s Terms of Service that’s raising questions. Under section 5, a new “Liquidated Damages” section gives the platform the right to fine users who use it too much.
“Protecting our users’ data and our system resources is important to us,” the section says before declaring that “you will be jointly and severally liable to us for liquidated damages as follows for requesting, viewing, or accessing more than 1,000,000 posts (including reply posts, video posts, image posts, and any other posts) in any 24-hour period,” at a rate of $15,000 for each million posts.
If you keep doing that, this section adds, X reserves the right to enact “injunctive and/or other equitable relief, in addition to monetary damages.”
This policy is presumably meant to dissuade competitors from scraping X to train their own AI models, but some warn that it could also block researchers from using automated scraping tools for academic purposes.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University called this “a disturbing move” in a statement posted on October 17. “The public relies on journalists and researchers to understand whether and how the platforms are shaping public discourse, affecting our elections, and warping our relationships,” Knight litigation director Alex Abdo said. “One effect of X Corp.’s new terms of service will be to stifle that research when we need it most.”
The good news is, you can opt out of this training on the desktop. As of this writing, the option was still available. On X.com, you can navigate to Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Grok and uncheck the box that says Allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning.
If you feel the need to take it a step further, here’s how to delete your tweets and/or your X account.
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