You may have seen a pop-up on X this week informing you of a change to its Terms of Service, which you have to agree to in order to continue using the app. The main change here relates to granting permission for X to use your data in its AI training, and by tapping through, and continuing to use the app, you’ve effectively given it permission to do so moving forward.
Congratulations, you’re not a contributor to xAI.
You can view the current and coming X Terms of Service for clarity, but the main change is in the “Your Rights and Grant of Rights in the Content” section of the document, which now includes more specific wording around your agreement to letting X use your posts to train its AI models.
A new element added to this section notes that:
“You agree that this license includes the right for us to analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
So, effectively, by agreeing to these terms, which, again, you’re doing by using the app, you’re granting X legal permission to use whatever you post to the platform to train its AI models.
Can you opt out? Well, no, not unless you live in EU.
X is not currently using EU user data for AI training, due to Europe’s more stringent data permission laws, which will require X to come up with an explicit setting for EU users specifically.
If you don’t live in Europe, you can opt out of having your conversations with X’s Grok chatbot included within the training set.
But that only relates to engagements with Grok, not your general X activity (which is a little unclear in X’s explanation above).
So, by tapping through on the new pop-up, and continuing to use X, you’re giving permission for anything that you upload to the app to be added into the X and xAI data training process. Which is pretty much par for the course with social apps these days, but if you see some post being distributed which explains how you can tell X that you don’t want them to use your data for AI training, know that this is not correct.
The permission is in the Terms of Service, and by using the app, you’ve agreed.
X’s new Terms of Service come into effect from November 15th, 2024.
