X says you can prevent Grok from editing your photos

X has introduced a new feature that makes it a little more difficult for other users to handle photos uploaded using the Grok chatbot. As reported Social media today And verify it Edgea new toggle under Photo Upload Settings on the X iOS app says it can “Block Edits by Grok” when enabled. But it doesn’t In reality Prevent Grok from editing your photos.

The small print below the feature’s name reveals a big limitation: users can only “Prevent Grok from editing this content.” In our testing, this toggle only blocks the xAI chatbot’s tagging mechanism in responses to a photo on Real men, slimand children In early January. This was the advantage Banned for free X accounts In response to the global backlash from Legislators and Organizersbut paying subscribers can still edit photos by tagging the bot.

This new option is not easy to find. When you upload an image to the X post builder, you can locate it by clicking the paintbrush icon that appears at the bottom right of the thumbnail, and then selecting the flag icon at the bottom right of the editing taskbar. The Grok Blocker did not appear at any time during the X-image web upload process in our testing. The switch also doesn’t appear on older content that’s already uploaded to X.

Edge Posted a photo on X with Grock block toggle enabled and tried to edit it with separate accounts. While free users are already banned from editing photos via @Grok’s replies, the new switch also prevents paying premium subscribers from doing so. This is just one of several ways X users can edit photos with Grok, and the switch did absolutely nothing to protect against others.

I can still hold down a protected photo on the X iOS app to open the “Edit Photo with Grok” option with a free X account, which opens the photo directly in the Grok app. From there, the app doesn’t try to stop me from processing the image. I can also save a protected image, re-upload it to the same X series, and flag Grok for editing from there now that I’ve stripped the blocking protection.

This feature has not yet been officially announced, so its availability and development status are currently unclear. We asked X for comment.