The Cost of Neglect: Grok and AI Safety

0:00Grok is in a bit of a hot water controversy right now for thousands of leaked chat conversations And this can obviously be problematic for any AI model, but I think it's particularly interesting basically because OpenAI had a similar problem and Elon Musk made fun of them just recently for this very same thing. So today on the podcast, I want to dive into basically a problem that we're seeing with OpenAI, Grok, and possibly a ton of other AI models, what you should probably do to protect your own personal conversations, and where this goes for the whole industry altogether. So let's get into it.

0:33Before we do, I wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your business using AI tools, I'd love to have you as a member of the AI hustle school community. Every single week, I record an exclusive video or piece of content where I break down using a different AI tool to grow and scale my businesses. I show the exact numbers, I show exact revenue, and I show basically what I'm doing. So all the stuff I don't publish publicly, you can see over on that school community, there's over 300 members and it's an incredible place to network and get a lot of really good alpha basically on how to use AI to grow and scale your career.

1:05So check it out. There's a link in the description. It is school.com slash AI hustle. And yeah, I would love to have you as a member of the community. It's 20 bucks a month. And the price will go up in the future. But if you lock in that price now, it won't ever be raised on you. All right, let's get into what's going on with Grok. Basically, the problem here is that 1000s of Grok chats are now searchable on Google. So not just public, but you can actually search for these things on Google. Hundreds of 1000s of them. And basically this is because XAI did the same thing as OpenAI. They had a share button.

1:36And if you click that share button, like maybe you want to go share it with a friend or something, maybe you're like, oh, this is interesting. I'll just send it to a buddy. All of a sudden it becomes public. A public link is generated and it can be queried and people can actually go and find it. It's pretty easily accessible. Forbes did a whole report on this, but yeah, you just, you basically can go and do like a site search and you can go and find this on Google. So not fantastic news by any stretch of the imagination. So according to Forbes, all of the URLs are currently being indexed by Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, so basically the entire internet.

2:10And users of Meta and OpenAI have also been affected by similar problems. So this, like I mentioned, isn't a new thing. This is something that can happen to anyone. Meta got a lot of flack when all of their stuff went public. OpenAI got a lot of flack. And basically, it's these share buttons and their searchability that is getting people in trouble. You could say like everyone's like, oh, these were like leaked. But technically, people did click the share button. And maybe there's one share with one person or maybe they accidentally click the share button. And all of a sudden, it's now indexed on Google.

2:37One thing that I will say that's interesting is basically from this leak of Grok, you can see it like a lot of people are making a big deal about basically getting the inside glimpse into what a lot of people are using these different AI tools for Grok in particular. We're searching through and of course, they're going to find the most scandalous and outrageous things to share because this is journalism and it gets the clicks. But it is kind of crazy. Apparently, there's people that are asking questions about how to hack crypto wallets. There is all sorts of, you know, NSFW conversations with Grok's AI personas.

3:07Also, someone was asking for instructions on how to cook meth. And someone even asked it for instructions on how to assassinate Elon Musk. So literally nothing was off the off the off limits. People are asking basically every unhinged thing you could you would imagine. What's interesting is XAI's rules do prohibit like Grok from, you know, doing a few things. Number one, they say promoting critical harm or promoting critical harming human life, bioweapon, chemical weapons, or weapons of mass destruction. And obviously, even with those being in their terms of service, people were still able to try to figure out ways around it, which is very interesting.

3:45According to conversations that were basically, you know, easily accessible on Google, Grok gave users instructions on making fentanyl, listed a whole bunch of, yeah, all sorts of terrible things, handed out bomb construction tips, and of course had the Elon Musk assassination plan clearly outlined. XAI isn't making a big deal about it. They're not really responding to any comments on this. But last month, we know ChatGPT had a very similar issue with all of their chats being indexed on Google as well. And when this happened, Elon Musk actually tweeted out in response to basically the whole controversy going on with OpenAI.

4:24And he said, Grok for the win, or basically saying, yeah, look, like it's terrible that OpenAI is having this kind of leak. Grok is awesome. And what do you know? Just like two weeks later, Grok had basically the exact same issue. So it doesn't seem like Grok was safe from this. What's interesting is after he said Grok for the win, he said that Grok has no such sharing feature and prioritizes privacy. So evidently after he said that, someone added it or he was unaware it was there and is now getting them into just as much hot water as everybody else has been getting into. So I think basically my big takeaway here and what I would urge everyone to do is if you're doing a conversation on chat, GBT, Grok, Google, or literally anything that you don't want to get published publicly, of course, like, of course, you could be like, oh, I'm not gonna push the share button.

5:11you might accidentally push the share button. You might try to share with one person. There's all sorts of things that could accidentally happen. I would just say if you have a conversation that you don't want publicly shared anywhere, all of these tools have a private mode. If you're asking it about some sort of personal medical health problem or question or what to do with the infection on your thumb or just something that you don't want everyone in the world to know about, I would just go into private mode and ask it questions. Now, I think this is basically accessible on all different models.

5:37So that's what I would generally recommend for everyone to do. If you do that, you basically are going to keep it. So those aren't ever going to accidentally get shared. And also, if you ever have to share your account with someone, it's basically the same thing. If you leave your account logged in somewhere, you're sharing your account with someone, you wouldn't want them, you know, digging through and seeing all your personal medical stuff. This is probably the best way to do it. So thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. I hope that this advice, these tips were useful. Make sure to go check out AIbox.ai to try out all of the latest AI models, including the latest from Grok and everywhere else.

6:10Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll catch you in the next episode.