The case comes as Meta withdrew its virtual assistants from the EU after regulatory concerns.
ADVERTISEMENTSocial media platform X has been hit with legal action by the Irish Data Protection Authority over concerns about the company’s use of personal data to train its artificial intelligence tools.
The Irish DPC yesterday (6 August) filed a complaint at the High Court, as first reported by the Irish Examiner, over Grok, X's new feature available to premium and premium+ subscribers against a monthly fee of €8.54 and €17.08 respectively.
Grok became available last May and is, according to X, designed to "answer almost any user question with a touch of wit and humour, while also providing helpful and insightful responses." It would allow users to decide if their public posts and engagement activity could be used to improve the models used by the AI tool.
The Irish complaint comes as Italian consumer group Altoconsumo earlier this week also expressed concerns about use by AI tools of personal data, and the lack of a legal basis for the processing of personal data in X's latest privacy policy update of September 2023.
X said in a statement that the order that the Irish watchdog has sought is “unwarranted, overboard and singles out X without any justification. This is deeply troubling.”
The company claimed that it has been proactive in working with regulators on questions related to Grok since 2023. “We have been fully transparent with them about the use of public data relating to AI models. This has included providing necessary legal assessments and engagements where it's been discussed in length,” the statement said.
X said it will be pursuing all available avenues to challenge the legal action.
A spokesperson for the Irish DPC said that as the matter is before the courts, "it would be inappropriate to comment at this time."
Meta stopped roll-out of virtual assistants
In a similar case, US tech giant Meta said last month (18 July) that it will not roll-out multimodel AI models – so-called virtual assistants - in Europe due to regulatory unpredictability.
The company had already paused the deployment of its AI assistant in Europe after the Irish Data Protection Commission told Meta to postpone its plan to use data from Facebook and Instagram adult users to train large language models (LLMs).
Meta updated its privacy policy asking to take all public and non-public user data – with the exception of chats between individuals – for use in current and future AI technology, which was due to take effect on 26 June.
