X Updates Terms of Service to More Explicitly Cover AI Training Permissions

You may have seen a pop-up on X this week informing you of a change to its Terms of Service, which you have to agree to in order to continue using the app. The main change here relates to granting permission for X to use your data in its AI training, and by tapping through, and continuing to use the app, you’ve effectively given it permission to do so moving forward.

Congratulations, you’re not a contributor to xAI.

You can view the current and coming X Terms of Service for clarity, but the main change is in the “Your Rights and Grant of Rights in the Content” section of the document, which now includes more specific wording around your agreement to letting X use your posts to train its AI models.

A new element added to this section notes that:

“You agree that this license includes the right for us to analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”

So, effectively, by agreeing to these terms, which, again, you’re doing by using the app, you’re granting X legal permission to use whatever you post to the platform to train its AI models.

Can you opt out? Well, no, not unless you live in EU.

X is not currently using EU user data for AI training, due to Europe’s more stringent data permission laws, which will require X to come up with an explicit setting for EU users specifically.  

If you don’t live in Europe, you can opt out of having your conversations with X’s Grok chatbot included within the training set.

But that only relates to engagements with Grok, not your general X activity (which is a little unclear in X’s explanation above).

So, by tapping through on the new pop-up, and continuing to use X, you’re giving permission for anything that you upload to the app to be added into the X and xAI data training process. Which is pretty much par for the course with social apps these days, but if you see some post being distributed which explains how you can tell X that you don’t want them to use your data for AI training, know that this is not correct.

The permission is in the Terms of Service, and by using the app, you’ve agreed.

In addition to this, X has also updated its Privacy Policy with a note relating to third party data usage:

"Depending on your settings, or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties. If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in X’s Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise.

This effectively allows X to onsell your data to third party AI developers, which could provide it with another revenue stream. X upped the price of its API access last year in order to stop AI developers (most notably Elon's AI nemesis OpenAI) from "stealing" its data, and this clause gives it legal backing for future deals along the same lines.

What's not clear as yet is how exactly users will be able to opt out of this, as noted in the policy, but as TechCrunch notes, that option may be activated once the policy is enacted next month.

Also worth noting that X has expanded the period for which it can access your data, with the current policy stating that it will keep personally identifiable data for a maximum of 18 months. The new policy states that there are variable time limits for the data it uses, which could extend for the life of your account in some instances.

Again, there's nothing overly surprising here, as X has already stated that the differentiating factor of its AI tools will be that they're trained on real-time data from X, which will give it an advantage. So it's already using your X posts as data inputs for Grok and other AI projects, the wording here just clarifies such from a legal standpoint.

But if you didn't know, now you do, with these clauses being built into X's user documentation.

X's new Terms of Service come into effect from November 15th, 2024.