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Elon Musk’s xAI controls Grok, an AI chatbot integrated within the X (or Twitter, as most of us still call it) social media platform. In 2024, Grok began to train on public tweets by default—meaning, if you didn’t want to provide data to the AI, you had to now opt out. The move was unnerving; who wants to help train an AI that has produced racist and antisemitic rhetoric and generated sexualized images of underage girls? Not me.
It’s important to remember that all these tools are directly influenced by the people who make them, so it’s not just about Grok. But it just feels like I’m always hearing about how this specific AI is saying or doing something offensive because Musk wants to weigh in on whatever public discourse is happening at the time. (Remember when Grok had a lot to say about white genocide in South Africa?) If you’re still using X but don’t want any part in training Grok, here’s how to make sure it doesn’t use your data against your will.
According to this help page, X shares your public data with xAI, a Musk startup that acquired X in 2025 and was acquired by SpaceX in February. It’s responsible for training and developing generative AI models, including Grok. That public data includes public posts, engagements, reposts, conversations on Spaces, profile information (such as your bio and display name), and any interactions you may have with Grok itself. This is all used to improve Grok’s ability to understand requests, provide more accurate responses, and personalize its interactions with you.
The good news is that X offers several ways to control when your public data and interactions with Grok are used to train the company’s AI systems. You can opt out of model training and Grok personalization, delete your conversation history with Grok, or make your account private.
To ensure my data wasn’t being used to train Grok, I opened Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Grok & Third-party Collaborators and found three things enabled by default:
I unchecked all three. If you previously used Grok and now want nothing to do with it, click Delete conversation history and choose Delete again.
The other way to protect your tweets from Grok is to make your account private, since X doesn’t use data from private accounts for its AI training. Go to Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Audience, media and tagging, and enable Protect your posts, so only people who follow you can see your tweets. (Look for a lock icon next to your username to know it’s protected.) Click the box next to Protect your videos, and any videos in your posts will not be downloadable by default.
Though X has blocked Grok from creating sexualized images of people without permission and limited public image editing via the Grok X account to paid subscribers, edit buttons are still on every photo posted to X, allowing you to alter them privately. Recently, X rolled out an update that allows you to block those private edits, but the option is fairly well hidden and must be implemented on a case-by-case basis.
To block Grok from being able to edit your photos, you need to customize permissions before you post the image to X. You can’t do it after the fact. I was also only able to do this on the web; the option is available on iOS, but not Android yet. I added an image to a post, then clicked the photo to open editing options. From there, I selected the Flag icon, then enabled Block modifications by Grok.
Of course, the most effective thing you can do to stop Grok, xAI, and X from burning down the world is to leave the platform entirely. That could mean deleting your existing posts or closing your account. For more detailed instructions on this, see our dedicated guide.
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