Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk put out a call on his social media platform Tuesday for people to submit their medical scans to Grok, his AI chatbot. But experts are advising people to use caution when sharing sensitive information to train tech platforms.
Musk asked users to “try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI or other medical images” to the artificial intelligence platform for analysis. “This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good. Let us know where Grok gets it right or needs work,” he added on X.
Musk launched Grok, which is part of his company xAI, last year. The company bills Grok (which means “to understand”) as “conversational AI for serious and not-so-serious discussions.” It’s also, as Wired put it, created to have fewer guardrails than its big name competitors, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. That could mean it could perpetuate biased content, share dangerous ideas, and hallucinate.
Musk’s call to share medical data certainly raises some privacy-related questions. Experts widely agree against sharing sensitive data with publicly available AI systems. Even xAI’s own privacy policy discourages users from including personal information in prompts. “Please do not share any personal information (including any sensitive information) in your questions to Grok,” the website states.
Ryan Tarzy, CEO of health tech startup Avandra Imaging, says in an email that Musk is trying to speed up Grok’s development by bypassing direct-sourcing the data rather than obtaining the data from a secure network where patient data has been de-identified.
“This approach has myriad risks, including the accidental sharing of patient identities,” Tarzy adds. “Personal health information is ‘burned in’ too many images, such as CT scans, and would inevitably be released in this plan. The data gathering will also not be systematic, and therefore, the dataset will be full of bias and not representative of the population.”
xAI is currently in talks with investors for a funding round that would value the company at $40 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. The company launched in 2023 with the mission of furthering “our collective understanding of the universe.”
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