Watchdog wants to know whether EU posts were used without consent under GDPR

Elon Musk's social media outfit X is again under the regulatory microscope in Europe – this time for allegedly using EU users' public posts to train its Grok AI chatbot, possibly without the transparency or legal basis required under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced Friday that it had kicked off an inquiry into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) - the newly renamed Irish entity responsible for Elon Musk's social media platform. The investigation seeks to determine whether XIUC's processing of publicly accessible posts from EU users to train its Grok AI models complies with the GDPR.

Notably, XIUC became the official data controller for EU users on April 1, following a rebranding from Twitter International Unlimited Company (TIUC), as part of the transition from Twitter to X.

Like many social media platforms exploring AI, X utilizes user-generated content to train machine ...