Online search as we know it is being upended because of how artificial intelligence is being used to trawl through data. X (formerly Twitter), for example, uses your data to train its Grok AI assistant. Do you have a say? Yes, you can opt out by visiting the settings menu, which is accessible through the web.

X’s @Safety account wrote in a post that the setting is available to all users on the web now and “will soon be rolled out on mobile”.

Meanwhile, Europe’s data protection watchdog is “seeking clarity” on a decision by Elon Musk’s X to allow users’ data to automatically be fed into xAI. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, the regulator responsible for holding Internet companies to EU privacy law, said it had been engaging with X “for months” over the issue.

Meta has already paused its plan to train its AI on data from its Facebook and Instagram platforms in Europe following a request from the Irish DPC around GDPR compliance concerns.

Coming back to X, in the menu, you can uncheck a box to opt out of allowing “your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning purposes”. The other way to protect your data is to have a private account, which “prevents your posts from being used to train Grok’s underlying model or to generate responses to user queries”.

Grok is available to premium subscribers on X and was first released last November as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot is part of artificial intelligence startup xAI, which Elon Musk owns, and has been trained on X data.

Nobody’s sure when the option to opt out first became available. An archived version of X’s About page for Grok from May mentioned the steps to get to the setting.

Musk has been open about using data from X to train Grok. The AI chatbot has been doing this to summarise news events and answer questions with real-time information. The company’s privacy policy, last updated in September 2023, says that “we may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy”.