Musk bows to pressure to ditch 'illegal' AI training plan

Elon Musk’s problems just keep on coming after the Irish Data Protection Commission has confirmed X has agreed to permanently halt training its AI chatbot Grok on personal data lifted from public posts made by the platform’s 60 million EU users without consent.

The move follows court action by the Irish DPC in early August, although whether that will be the end of the matter depends on privacy campaigner Max Schrems, who has also rifled off a barrage of complaints over the issue to nine other authorities.

His privacy organisation, NOYB maintains that the Irish DPC has not gone for the core violations and filed the GDPR complaints to ensure that the core legal problems around X AI training are fully addressed.

The organisation argues that the more EU data protection authorities get involved in the proceedings, the greater the pressure on the Irish DPC to follow through with its case and on X to actually comply with EU law.

At the time, Schrems said: “The court documents are not public, but from the oral hearing we understand that the Irish DPC was not questioning the legality of this processing itself. It seems the regulator was more concerned with so-called ‘mitigation measures’ and a lack of cooperation by X. The Irish DPC seems to take action around the edges, but shies away from the core problem.”

NOYB says no determination on the legality was made and many questions remain unanswered, including what has happened with EU data that was already ingested in the systems and how can X separate EU and non-EU data.

Schrems concluded: “We have seen countless instances if inefficient and partial enforcement by the Irish DPC in the past years. We want to ensure that X fully complies with EU law, which – at a bare minimum – requires to ask users for consent in this case.”

NOYB has yet to comment on the latest development.

In June, Schrems’ action against Facebook owner Meta forced the tech giant to pause its own AI training programme, which was using years of personal posts, private images or online tracking data from its social media sites to build a new platform.