Does what’s said between you and your AI chat stay between you and your AI chat? Nope.
According to a report by Forbes, Elon Musk’s AI assistant Grok published more than 370,000 chats on the Grok website. Those URLs, which were not necessarily intended for public consumption by users, were then indexed by search engines and entered the public sphere.
It wasn’t just chats. Forbes reported that uploaded documents, such as photos, spreadsheets and other documents, were also published.
Representatives for xAI, which makes Grok, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The publishing of Grok conversations is the latest in a series of troubling reports that should spur chatbot users to be overly cautious about what they share with AI assistants. Don’t just gloss over the Terms and Conditions, and be mindful of the privacy settings.
Earlier this month, 404 Media reported on a researcher who discovered more than 130,000 chats with AI assistants Claud, Chat GPT and others were readable on Archive.org.
When a Grok chat is finished, the user can hit a share button to create a unique URL, allowing the conversation to be shared with others. According to Forbes, “hitting the share button means that a conversation will be published on Grok’s website, without warning or a disclaimer to the user.” These URLs were also made available to search engines, allowing anyone to read them.
There is no disclaimer that these chat URLs will be published for the open internet. But the Terms of Service outlined on the Grok website reads: “You grant, an irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, and worldwide right to xAI to use, copy, store, modify, distribute, reproduce, publish, display in public forums, list information regarding, make derivative works of, and aggregate your User Content and derivative works thereof for any purpose…”
