More than 370,000 Grok AI chats have been published on the Grok website and indexed by search engines, making them public.
In addition to the interactive chats themselves, Elon Musk’s xAI company also published photos, spreadsheets and other uploaded documents …
Grok has a share button which creates a unique URL, allowing users to share the conversation with someone else by sending them the link. However, those links were made available to search engines, meaning that anybody could be given access to chats rather than just those who were sent the link.
Forbes reports that users were not given any warning about the fact that the contents of their chats and uploaded documents would be made available to the public.
On Musk’s Grok, hitting the share button means that a conversation will be published on Grok’s website, without warning or a disclaimer to the user.
Today, a Google search for Grok chats shows that the search engine has indexed more than 370,000 user conversations with the bot. The shared pages revealed conversations between Grok users and the LLM that range from simple business tasks like writing tweets to generating images of a fictional terrorist attack in Kashmir and attempting to hack into a crypto wallet.
Forbes reviewed conversations where users asked intimate questions about medicine and psychology; some even revealed the name, personal details and at least one password shared with the bot by a Grok user. Image files, spreadsheets and some text documents uploaded by users could also be accessed via the Grok shared page.
The contents of some of these chats also reveal that Grok was not following xAI’s own stated rules on prohibited drugs and topics.
Grok offered users instructions on how to make illicit drugs like fentanyl and methampine, code a self-executing piece of malware, construct a bomb, and methods of suicide. Grok also offered a detailed plan for the assassination of Elon Musk.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened. ChatGPT transcripts were also appearing in Google search results, although in those cases users had agreed to make their conversations discoverable to others. The company quickly abandoned this after describing it as a short-lived experiment.
The Grok revelation is particularly ironic after Musk last year made baseless privacy claims against the Apple and OpenAI partnership.
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