The Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating X and its AI

Its purpose: to assess whether social media has complied with the law regarding the use of Canadians’ personal information when training its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The Reuters application is seen on an iPhone in this photo illustration on January 29, 2019. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“[The investigation] will focus on the platform’s compliance with federal privacy law with respect to its collection, use, and disclosure of Canadians’ personal information to train artificial intelligence models,” reads a statement from the commissioner.

A member of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Brian Masse, stated that he wrote this week to the Privacy Commissioner to request an investigation into X.

“Transparency and sunlight are crucial at a time when algorithms could be manipulated to spread misinformation. Canadians have a right to know if and how their personal data is being used,” said Masse in a statement.

Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is also the founder of the artificial intelligence company xAI.

Following Musk’s acquisition of platform X in October 2022, X has made the Grok chatbot from xAI available to its users.

Generative AI models such as Grok require a lot of data to be trained and developed. Last week, xAI presented Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot, which is being deployed immediately for Premium+ subscribers on X.

Grok is an artificial intelligence assistant that helps users accomplish various tasks, including answering questions, solving problems, and brainstorming, X explains on its website.