X, which used to be Twitter, now uses Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature in the Explore section of the app that summarizes the personalized popular stories. A post and screenshots from the X Engineering team on Friday say that Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X that are related to each popular story on the For You tab in Explore.
The “For You” page shows you the news and stories that are popular in your network and are being shared across X’s platform, along with other suggestions. It’s one of the first places X users go when they want to see what’s new on the app without having to read through their timeline for a long time.
For example, today on a TechCrunch reader’s “For You” page, there might be news about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s changes to security, and AI engineers getting tired of their jobs. When you click on a story to see the X posts that go with it, a description of the story will now show up at the top of the page. This gives you a quick idea of what the story is about.
For example, the Grok-powered summary of the AI burnout story starts with, “AI engineers are facing burnout and rushed rollouts due to the competitive race in the tech industry, as companies put investor satisfaction ahead of solving real problems.” The story ends by saying that “critics argue that proper safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be afterthoughts in the pursuit of AI investments…” This is the last thing that is said about the problem of the AI “rat race.”
It’s funny that a message shows below that summary saying, “Grok can make mistakes, check its outputs.”
Making short versions of trends is not a new idea, but the way these short versions are being made is new. Back when it was run by a different person, Twitter started adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, but not with the help of an AI bot. Twitter would instead add more information to some of its daily trends and pin a sample tweet to give more information. Twitter, on the other hand, rolled out slowly, and some trends were written up while others weren’t.
It’s called Grok’s Stories, and it sums up all the most important news on the For You page.
Being able to use xAI’s chatbot Grok is meant to be a reason for people to buy premium packages. For users with the Premium and Premium+ plans, the bottom middle button of the app is how they can get to Grok. A snarky and “rebellious” AI, Grok is different from other AI apps like ChatGPT because it has real-time access to X data that none of the other AIs have.
A tech journalist named Alex Kantrowitz wrote on X on Friday about Elon Musk’s next plan for AI-powered news on X. The post is based on an email chat the tech journalist had with the owner of X.
Kantrowitz says that Grok’s summaries will be mostly made up of talks about X. That is, Grok won’t look at the story text, even if that’s what people are talking about on the platform. What people are talking about on X might not be the news itself, but rather their reactions or views to it. This could make it hard to get a clear picture of the news at hand. It’s “controversial” for Kantrowitz to support the move, but he does see a chance in it.
There are already AI news reports out there that journalists have to deal with in other areas, including from startups. One example is Arc’s new web browser, which has an AI summary tool. Also, engineers who used to work at Twitter are making Particle, an AI news summary service. We don’t yet know how this will affect the number of people who visit news sites. “Deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” Kantrowitz writes, readers may want to take a look. But it’s also possible that some news sites will shut down because AI summaries make people less interested in their pages. This means that AI bots like Grok will have fewer sources to summarize in the long run.
But because of this, some news outlets are making deals with AI companies, like OpenAI’s relationship with the FT, which was just announced. Axel Springer, the AP, and Le Monde are among others that have said they will do the same. In the case of X, it can get to the news through the talk about it, without having to partner to get to the news itself. That’s both smart and scary, especially because it could spread false information.
Also Read: Elon Musk Says Xai Will Open-source Grok This Week
People who pay for Premium X are now getting Grok’s Stories. If you pay on the web instead of in an app shop, Premium starts at $8 per month.
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