ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOL ‘Grok’ is being investigated by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for its processing of private data to train the chatbot, the watchdog announced today.

Grok, which features on Elon Musk’s social media site X, is a generative AI chatbot. It was launched in November 2023. It is the name of a group of AI models developed by xAI, the AI company founded by Elon Musk earlier that year.

Grok works as a querying chatbot available on the platform, allowing users to ask it questions and query the legitimacy of posts online. Like other Large Language Models, the tool is trained on a variety of data.

The Data Protection Commission (DPC) said today that the inquiry will examine the processing of personal data, made available by publicly accessible posts on platform posted by EU users and users in the European Economic Area, to train its chatbot.

The inquiry’s purpose is to determine whether the personal data Grok used to train was lawfully processed.

The inquiry will examine its compliance of GDPR and issues of transparency and lawfulness in its training, the DPC added.