More than 370,000 Grok chats have been indexed by search engines, exposing hundreds of sensitive queries.
When Private AI Chats Become Public: Lessons from Grok’s Privacy Spill
Understand the implications of the Grok breach where hundreds of thousands of private chats were leaked to the public.
Grok
Grok is an AI assistant built by xAI. Chat, create images, write code, and get real-time answers from the web and X.
Grok chatbot allowed users to create digitally altered photos of minors in "minimal clothing"
Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company xAI, said it is fixing "lapses in safeguards" after social media users said it was generating sexualized photos of minors.
What You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your Privacy
xAI’s generative AI tool, Grok AI, is unhinged compared to its competitors. It’s also scooping up a ton of data that people post on X. Here’s how to keep your posts out of Grok—and why you should.
Elon, stop trying to make Grok happen
New data suggests government workers don’t like Elon Musk’s chatbot. Does anybody?
Grok in the Wild: Characterizing the Roles and Uses of Large Language Models on Social Media
xAI's large language model, Grok, is called by millions of people each week on the social media platform X. Prior work characterizing how large language models are used has focused on private, one-on-one interactions. Grok's deployment on X represents a major departure from this setting, with interactions occurring in a public social space. In this paper, we systematically sample three months of interaction data to investigate how, when, and to what effect Grok is used on X. At the platform level, we find that Grok responds to 62% of requests, that the majority (51%) are in English, and that engagement is low, with half of Grok's responses receiving 20 or fewer views after 48 hours. We also inductively build a taxonomy of 10 roles that LLMs play in mediating social interactions and use these roles to analyze 41,735 interactions with Grok on X. We find that Grok most often serves as an information provider but, in contrast to LLM use in private one-on-one settings, also takes on roles related to dispute management, such as truth arbiter, advocate, and adversary. Finally, we characterize the population of X users who prompted Grok and find that their self-expressed interests are closely related to the roles the model assumes in the corresponding interactions. Our findings provide an initial quantitative description of human-AI interactions on X, and a broader understanding of the diverse roles that large language models might play in our online social spaces.
Grok in the Wild: Characterizing the Roles and Uses of Large Language Models on Social Media
xAI's large language model, Grok, is called by millions of people each week on the social media platform X. Prior work characterizing how large language models are used has focused on private, one-on-one interactions. Grok's deployment on X represents a major departure from this setting, with interactions occurring in a public social space. In this paper, we systematically sample three months of interaction data to investigate how, when, and to what effect Grok is used on X. At the platform level, we find that Grok responds to 62% of requests, that the majority (51%) are in English, and that engagement is low, with half of Grok's responses receiving 20 or fewer views after 48 hours. We also inductively build a taxonomy of 10 roles that LLMs play in mediating social interactions and use these roles to analyze 41,735 interactions with Grok on X. We find that Grok most often serves as an information provider but, in contrast to LLM use in private one-on-one settings, also takes on roles related to dispute management, such as truth arbiter, advocate, and adversary. Finally, we characterize the population of X users who prompted Grok and find that their self-expressed interests are closely related to the roles the model assumes in the corresponding interactions. Our findings provide an initial quantitative description of human-AI interactions on X, and a broader understanding of the diverse roles that large language models might play in our online social spaces.
Dark web users cite Grok as tool for making 'criminal imagery' of kids, U.K. watchdog says
The Internet Watch Foundation said it found topless images of girls that dark web forum users attributed to xAI’s Grok Imagine.
Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized
How companies are gaming the chatbot internet
Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal
Guardian found OpenAI’s platform cited Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers
Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.
AI chatbots are blowing up the 30-year economic relationship publishers have had with search engines. Many think this will kill the web if not addressed. Google needs to change first. It's resisting. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince is going to try and make them.
Ireland and Spain Launch Investigations Into X’s Grok
Various other nations have also launched investigations into the artificial intelligence chatbot.
The ChatGPT effect: In 3 years the AI chatbot has changed the way people look things up
ChatGPT has dramatically altered how people retrieve information, muscling aside Google search as the first stop on the hunt for answers.
The ChatGPT effect: In 3 years the AI chatbot has changed the way people look things up
ChatGPT has dramatically altered how people retrieve information, muscling aside Google search as the first stop on the hunt for answers.
Musk’s Grok AI chatbot is still making sexual deepfakes, despite X’s promise to stop it
An NBC News review found dozens of AI-generated sexualized images of real women posted to X over the past month.
How People Use ChatGPT
Despite the rapid adoption of LLM chatbots, little is known about how they are used. We document the growth of ChatGPT’s consumer product from its launch in November 2022 through July 2025, when it had been adopted by around 10% of the world’s adult population. Early adopters were disproportionately male but the gender gap has narrowed dramatically, and we find higher growth rates in lower-income countries. Using a privacy-preserving automated pipeline, we classify usage patterns within a representative sample of ChatGPT conversations. We find steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in non-work-related messages, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage. Work usage is more common for educated users in highly-paid professional occupations. We classify messages by conversation topic and find that “Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing” are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing dominates work-related tasks, highlighting chatbots’ unique ability to generate digital outputs compared to traditional search engines. Computer programming and self-expression both represent relatively small shares of use. Overall, we find that ChatGPT provides economic value through decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs.
