The Mass Exodus Is Well Underway

In recent months, hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied X users have closed their accounts and taken flight. X’s traffic has decreased. Dramatically.

Why?

A change in X blocking is one reason. It used to be that when you blocked someone, they couldn’t see anything you posted and vice versa. Now, if your posts are set to public, “accounts you have blocked can see your posts. However, they cannot engage (like, reply, repost, etc.) with your posts.”

Another reason for the exodus: X’s stance on AI.

X’s Position

Note the references to artificial intelligence:

“We use the information we collect to provide and operate X products and services. We also use the information we collect to improve and personalize our products and services so that you have a better experience on X, including by showing you more relevant content and ads, suggesting people and topics to follow, enabling and helping you discover affiliates, third-party apps, and services. We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy.”

“Depending on your settings, or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties. If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in X’s Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise.”

The X Data Sharing and Personalization Policy

The following setting is on by default. If you don’t like it, you must manually disable it.

“Allow your public data as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok and xAI to be used for training and fine-tuning.”

Further info under the same heading:

“X may share with xAI your X public data as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok on X to train and fine-tune Grok and other AI models developed by xAI. This helps us continuously improve your user experience.”

Although you can disable data sharing with business partners, once again, the default setting is on.

Grok Siphons from Every Source It Finds

Yes, X allows you to opt out of model training, but its default setting of on means that whatever you have shared up to the time you disable it has already been gobbled by their insatiable artificial intelligence — an affront to all creatives.

More info from X: How do I control whether my data is used for Grok training and fine-tuning?

The Bottom Line

How much time have you spent creating your blog or novel or poetry or artwork — or other creative vision? Do you trust a multi-$billion company to prioritize your best interests?

You can disable all the non-privacy controls you want on whatever you share, but that won’t stop xAI from feasting on your works that are available elsewhere. As soon as another member shares it, Grok will devour the content.

You Need to Protect Your Website

If you have a domain, you can discourage access to X’s AI with the following lines in your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: Twitterbot
Disallow: /

However, this directive assumes that the xAI crawler will honor the robots.txt file. Do you trust it?

A more stringent approach: Edit your .htaccess file.

But .htaccess edits can render your site useless if you make a mistake. A single-character typo will cause a 500 error (which means your server has encountered an unexpected condition that prevents it from fulfilling the user request).

But If You Decide to Tackle It

Right now, the crawler that grabs your content identifies itself as Twitterbot.

You can add this line to your .htaccess file IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING. Other directives before and after the following line are required, and may vary depending on your configuration.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Twitterbot/" [NC,OR]

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, don’t. Hire someone who can (not me). Webmasters may prefer a slightly different approach. As I said in the previous section, a single mistyped character can bring down your website.

I take no responsibility for any damages you might incur by trying any suggestions in this post.

Apache.org provides more information on RewriteRule Flags.

And if You Post Content on Other Platforms …

… such as Blogger, Substack, Medium, Wattpad, etc., you won’t be able to stop the crawling and consumption of your creativity. Sorry. That’s the world we live in now that AI is gobbling everything it can find.

1984?

No, 2024.

Maybe even scarier than George Orwell’s view of the future.