X, the social network now owned by Elon Musk, will soon start summarizing news stories with xAI’s Grok chatbot.
The service will be rolled out to premium subscribers first, and the summaries generated by AI will be based on the tweets of users, not news articles from third parties. The announcement was made by the engineering team of the social network previously known as Twitter on Friday, saying that the stories will appear in the Explore section of the app on a page called For You.
Grok will pick trending topics
The For You page is for those users who don’t want to spend time scrolling their entire timeline, and tapping on it shows the stories and news that are shared all across the platform and are popular in networks you follow, along with some other items also present among suggestions.
When you tap on a story to view related posts, a summary of the topic will also appear, which will show a birds-eye view of the subject.
But there is another side to the summary you read, because below it a message will also appear, which will say
“Grok can make mistakes; verify its outputs.”
The statement is well justified considering the horrific mistake Grok made at the start of April during a test launch. It created a news story saying, “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.” This would have been concerning news considering the geopolitical situation and tensions between the two countries.
But the catch was that it was fake and was created by Grok when the feature of trending news was updated.
This was the result of the transition from content curation work previously handled by humans to now being relied on by AI.
The platform has followed the summarization approach for quite some time
Summarizing news trends is a concept that the platform has been following for quite some time, but this time it’s been done with artificial intelligence.
Back in 2020, before Musk’s takeover, Twitter used to show some headlines and written context for trending news topics, but those descriptions were probably written by humans. The Twitter algorithm was used to capture keywords and share the trend based on keyword selection.
The stories generated by Grok don’t have citations at the moment, but Musk told Big Technology in an email that better citations are coming when he was asked by Alex Kantrowitz, as Musk might want to avoid any copyright lawsuits. Musk told Kantrowitz that,
“As more information becomes available, the news summary will update to include that information. The goal is simple: to provide maximally accurate and timely information, citing the most significant sources.”
Source: Bigtechnology.
Musk also told the journalist that it’s not an easy goal, but the bot may become a useful news product because of the fact that Grok has access to the content on the X platform, which we think really gives it an edge over ChatGPT.
X is a source of traffic for many news websites that regularly tweet from their handles, and summarizing the topics will definitely affect their traffic, and some small players may even go out of business as users will spend more time on the social platform.
But X is not alone in this case; Google, Bing, and now the rumored ChatGPT search are all aiming for the same, which will affect traffic to other sources who basically provide the news that these giants will summarize, and it has yet to be seen how it plays out.
