The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced the opening of an investigation into the Grok AI model on Elon Musk’s X platform.
The inquiry will look into the processing of personal data in publicly-accessible posts posted on X by EU users, for the purposes of training generative artificial intelligence models, in particular the Grok Large Language Models (LLMs).
The inquiry will examine compliance with a range of key provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including with regard to the lawfulness and transparency of the processing.
Grok is the name of a group of AI models developed by xAI.
These models are used, among other things, to power a generative AI querying tool/Chabot, which is available on the X platform.
“Like other modern LLMs, the Grok LLMs have been developed and trained on a wide variety of data,” the DPC said in a statement.
It added that the inquiry will consider a range of issues concerning the use of a subset of this data which was controlled by X, namely personal data in publicly accessible posts posted on the ‘X’ social media platform by EU users.
“The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs,” the DPC said.
The decision to conduct the inquiry was taken by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland, and was notified to X this week.
