‘Just take a picture of your … data’

Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly encouraged users to upload sensitive medical records and “get a second opinion” from his chatbot, Grok — but according to a Forbes contributor, Grok offered a contradictory second opinion to Musk’s advice.

In November 2024, Futurism covered an earlier instance in which Musk urged Grok users to hand over their sensitive medical data, and one expert on medical data warned, “You don’t exactly know what Grok is going to do with it.”

At the time, outlets and clinicians noted that, unlike doctors and entities structured to process medical data, Grok was not bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, more commonly known as HIPAA.

On Feb. 17, Musk (@elonmusk) again invited X users to “just take a picture of your medical data or upload the file to get a second opinion from Grok.”

Information security is far from the only high-profile concern raised about Grok, chatbots, or artificial intelligence in recent months. 

Grok and its capabilities have been at the center of myriad controversies — the chatbot has spouted hateful rhetoric in two separate instances after updates, and the tool’s ability to undress any individual led to a ban in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Musk’s xAI is just one of the big players in the AI field, and Grok’s competitors, along with the technology itself, have become points of public contention. 

As tech firms began investing heavily in AI systems, the data centers needed to power them began blanketing the American landscape. Communities near data centers reported quality of life concerns, including unbearable, constant noise and reduced air quality.

Data centers became even more contentious when electric bills began spiking nationwide, driven in large part by their energy demand. 

Consequently, power and home heating costs became exorbitant for millions of Americans, and the Department of Energy issued a warning about insufficient grid capacity.

Forbes cited a Science News article, coincidentally published on the same day Musk tweeted about Grok’s purported diagnostic capabilities. 

It examined several published studies about AI’s abilities in medical environments.

One study found that patients using Google had a better chance of finding relevant information than those using tools such as Grok, and researchers concluded that “none of the tested language models were ready for deployment in direct patient care.”

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