Conversations with Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, can be publicly searched on Google depending on which buttons were pressed, a new report from Forbes revealed.
Grok’s “share” button — what you might use to email or text a chatbot conversation — creates a unique URL that is made available to search engines like Google, the report states. That effectively means the “share” button publishes your conversation for the world.
Forbes reported there is no warning of this feature and that thus far more than 370,000 conversations have been indexed by Google. Some of the conversations reportedly contained sensitive information, such as medical questions, personal details, and, in at least one instance, a password.
Forbes noted it had not received a response to a request for comment. Mashable has reached out to xAI, too, and did not immediately receive a response, but will update the story accordingly if we hear back.
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ChatGPT also made chats searchable on Google recently
Musk’s Grok isn’t the only AI chatbot to make chats public, however. As we covered at Mashable earlier this month, ChatGPT similarly made chats searchable on Google after users clicked the “share” button. OpenAI quickly reversed course, however, after a backlash.
“This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations,” OpenAI Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey wrote on X at the time. “This feature required users to opt-in, first by picking a chat to share, then by clicking a checkbox for it to be shared with search engines (see below).”
Stuckey said they removed the feature over worries folks would accidentally share information with search engines. It appears, according to the report from Forbes, that Grok not only makes conversations searchable — it’s also not an opt-in experience. In other words, the second you “share” a conversation, you share it with the world.
Musk — who is aggressively feuding with OpenAI these days — took a victory lap when the ChatGPT news broke. “Grok FTW,” he wrote on X. Now it appears his company is having the exact same issue.
