--- title: "Elon Musk Recommends Feeding Your Medical Scans Into His Grok AI" description: "Grok now has image understanding capabilities, and to test and improve, Elon Musk wants you to feed it medical documents." date: "2024-10-30" modified: "2024-10-30" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-grok-medical-scans" categories: - "Developments" - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "Health & Medicine" - "Medical" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "elon musk" - "grok" - "medical ai" --- # Elon Musk Recommends Feeding Your Medical Scans Into His Grok AI ![Grok now has image understanding capabilities, and to test and improve, Elon Musk wants you to feed it medical documents.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* X-formerly-Twitter owner and xAI CEO Elon Musk claims that his foul-mouthed AI chatbot Grok is now [capable of understanding images](). And what does its creator want you to do? Feed it private medical documents, of course. "Try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI or other medical images to Grok for analysis," Musk [wrote in a tweet]() on Tuesday. "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, presuming that his audience will be willing to freely test his chatbot for him with their possibly compromising medical information — and maybe even to trust its analysis. Sadly, he was right. Many users have already replied [sharing]() what the Magic Grok Ball had to say about their medical documents, ranging from brain and bone scans to blood charts. Being Musk fans, they were unsurprisingly enthusiastic about the chatbot's results. A few [celebrated]() the fact that they would no longer need to see a specialist. But doctors were more mixed. One [noted]() that Grok failed to identify a "textbook case" of tuberculosis that spread to the spine. Another [found]() that it wrongly diagnosed breast scans and missed clear signs of cancer. In a [hilarious case](), it mistook a benign breast cyst for testicles. To be clear, AI-assisted radiology is a serious, [burgeoning field of research]() — so there are many experts who feel hopeful about the technology. That doesn't mean it's being best represented by a general-purpose chatbot, however. Beyond the very high potential for misdiagnosis, submitting medical documents to an AI chatbot like Grok is a bad idea if you value your own privacy. Because Musk certainly doesn't: he billed Grok as having "[real-time access]()" to data via X, which many interpreted as an admission that he trained the chatbot on users' tweets. That remains unverified, but this [became an official policy in July](), when X gave users the ability to "opt-out" of having their data used to train Grok, when by default you were opted in. Chatbots are a [privacy nightmare]() in general. Because they use conversations to improve their capabilities, whatever you say to them could be inadvertently regurgitated in another conversation in some shape or form. Large organizations, from [JP Morgan]() to [Amazon](), have prohibited employees from speaking to chatbots for these very reasons. With all that being said**,** we'll spell out the obvious: don't fork over your medical info to Musk's "[anti-woke]()" chatbot, please. **More on chatbots:** *[After Teen's Suicide, Character.AI Is Still Hosting Dozens of Suicide-Themed Chatbots]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()