Introducing Stories by X: Delivering AI-Summarized News with Grok AI
X, formerly known as Twitter, has started utilizing Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok in order to fuel a function that summarizes trending stories personalized to the user within the application’s Explore portion. Based on an announcement and screen captures posted by X’s engineering team last Friday, premium subscribers of X will have the ability to read summaries of posts on X related to each trending story showcased under the For You tab within Explore.
Now accessible: Stories on X, powered by Grok AI.
Observe worldwide discussions through Stories on X, curated by @grok. Now offered to premium subscribers within the Explore tab.
Currently available only on web & iOS platforms – let us know your thoughts pic.twitter.com/Iv6zk9WugU
— Engineering (@XEng) May 3, 2024
The For You page showcases the news and stories circulating across X’s platform that draw attention within your network, along with other recommended pieces. It’s often the first destination for X’s users who aim to keep up with the dialogue on the platform without allocating excessive periods of time browsing the timeline.
For example, a reader from TechCrunch logging onto the For You page today might come across stories about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s security revision, and the rising fatigue among AI engineers. When you click on each story to read the corresponding X posts, a briefing of the tale is now shown at the top of the page, providing a synopsis of the theme.
In relation to the AI fatigue tale, for instance, the summary powered by Grok begins with: “AI engineers are becoming exhausted and hurried deployments due to the competitive environment of the tech industry, as businesses give precedence to the satisfaction of investors over the resolution of actual issues.” The summary briefly discusses the problem of the AI “rat race” and concludes with “critics argue that suitable safety measures and considerate innovation should not be neglected in the journey of AI investments…”
Humorously, a message appears below that summary, warning: “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”
The concept of summarising trends is not novel, but the way the summaries are being managed is. Previously, under different leadership, Twitter started adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, but not with AI assistance. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with additional details and then attach a relevant tweet to give more context. However, Twitter’s approach was inconsistent, with some trends being written up and others ignored.
In the case of Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are known, all the major news on the For You page is summarised.
The opportunity to utilise xAI’s chatbot Grok is envisioned to be an enticement to motivate users to purchase premium subscriptions. Users can avail of Grok by pressing the bottom middle button of the application with Premium and top-tier Premium+ plans. Also a rather sarcastic and “disruptive” AI, Grok’s unique selling point in relation to other AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is its unrivalled and real-time access to X data.
A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz explains Elon Musk’s latest plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner.
Kantrowitz states that discussions on X will form the basis of Grok’s summaries. In other words, Grok won’t consider the article text, even if it’s the topic of the platform’s conversations. This could potentially distort the portrayal of the news being shared, as the chatter on X might revolve around reactions or opinions, rather than the news itself. Kantrowitz labels this approach “controversial,” but concedes that it presents an opportunity.
New: @elonmusk emailed me about his strategy for AI news on X.
The plan is to use AI to integrate breaking news with commentary, generating real-time summaries of events. These can then be expanded through chat on Grok.
Here’s the full story! I’ll be talking more about this on Big Technology…
— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) <a href="https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz/status/1786439266303623188?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"
rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>May 3, 2024
Journalists are already having to contend with AI news summaries in other areas as well, including from startups. For example, Arc’s new web browser includes an AI summary feature and former Twitter engineers are building an <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/29/former-twitter-engineers-are-building-particle-an-ai-powered-news-reader/"
rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>AI news summary service called Particle. How this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves remains to be seen. Kantrowitz believes that users may be interested in going “deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views drop due to AI summaries, leaving fewer sources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long run.
For that reason, some news publishers are doing deals with AI providers like OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Others, such as Axel Springer, the AP, and Le Monde, have also announced similar moves. In X’s case, it’s able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself. That’s both clever and worrisome, the latter from a misinformation standpoint.
Grok’s Stories are now available to Premium X subscribers. Starting at $8 per month, access to Premium can be gained if payment is made on the web and not through the app stores.
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