In case you haven’t heard of it, or in case your brain is overloaded by all the incessant talk about AI this, chatbot that, xAI—an Elon Musk company—has its own generative AI in the vein of ChatGPT. This ChatGPT competitor is called Grok.
Grok, it turns out, is a bit of a blabbermouth, as according to Forbes, more than 370,000 chats by users are showing up on Google’s search results page, and they include exactly the kind of personal details I’d doubt the users would’ve felt comfortable showing up on the internet for all to find.
“In other words,” reads the Forbes article, “on Musk’s Grok, hitting the share button means that a conversation will be published on Grok’s website, without warning or a disclaimer to the user.”
Yikes.
a recurring problem
When a user hits the “share” button on a Grok chat, it creates a unique URL. “Unbeknownst to users, though, that unique URL is also made available to search engines, like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, making them searchable to anyone on the web,” writes the Forbes reporter.
While the transcripts of the chats aren’t publicly tied to the users who wrote them, that doesn’t mean content shared through a chat couldn’t be traced back to somebody through other identifiable means or context.
“The shared pages revealed conversations between Grok users and the LLM that range from simple business tasks like writing tweets to generating images of a fictional terrorist attack in Kashmir and attempting to hack into a crypto wallet,” Forbes’ author wrote.
“Forbes reviewed conversations where users asked intimate questions about medicine and psychology; some even revealed the name, personal details, and at least one password shared with the bot by a Grok user.”
Grok isn’t the only AI to yak up users’ chats on Google’s search results page. OpenAI’s own ChatGPT did the same earlier this month when some of its users’ chats showed up on Google. OpenAI ended up taking down ChatGPT’s share feature to put a lid on the public anger before it could fully boil over.
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