The artificial intelligence company “xAI,” owned by Elon Musk, is facing an investigation after discovering that thousands of conversations with the chatbot “Grok” are publicly accessible via the Google search engine. According to a report by Forbes magazine, Grok users who clicked the “share” button in their conversations were unknowingly publishing these conversations on a public web page.
Forbes reported that Google searches show more than 370,000 user conversations with the robot. The conversations included private questions about medicine and psychology, and some even revealed names, personal details, and passwords shared by Grok users with the robot. Image files, spreadsheets, and some other uploads by users were also accessible through the shared page.
Notably, xAI is not the only AI company that has published user conversations with its chatbots. Earlier this month, ChatGPT users from OpenAI were concerned when they found their conversations appearing in Google search results, even though they had chosen to make those conversations “undetectable” to others. However, after a wave of criticism, the company quickly changed its policy and discontinued this feature as it “provided users the option to inadvertently share information.” It’s likely that xAI will follow OpenAI’s actions to avoid criticism.
