X, formerly Twitter, is now using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that summarizes personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to a advertisement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, Premium X subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated with each trending story featured in the For You tab in Explore.
The For You page displays news and stories that are shared on the X platform and are popular within your network, along with other suggested items. It’s one of the first stops for X users who want to catch up on what’s being said on the platform, without having to spend a lot of time scrolling through their timeline.
For example, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today might include stories about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s security review, and burnout among AI engineers. As you navigate through each story to view the associated X posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, giving an overview of the topic.
In the case of the AI burnout story, for example, the Grok-driven summary begins: “AI engineers face burnout and rushed implementations due to the competitive race in the tech industry, as companies prioritize investor satisfaction about solving real problems. After briefly addressing the problem of the AI “rat race,” the article concludes by saying that “critics argue that adequate safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be afterthoughts in the pursuit of AI investments…”
Humorously, a message appears below that summary, warning: “Grok may make mistakes, check your results.”
The idea of summarizing trends is not new, but it is new in terms of how summaries are handled. Under his previous leadership, Twitter started adding headlines and descriptions. to its trends in 2020, although not with the help of an AI robot. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with additional information and pin a representative tweet to provide more context. However, Twitter’s launch was messy: some trends were posted and others were not.
With Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, all the main news on the For You page are summarized.
Access to xAI’s Grok chatbot is intended as a selling point to drive users to purchase premium subscriptions. With the top-tier Premium and Premium+ plans, users can access Grok by tapping the bottom center button of the app. A sarcastic and “rebellious” AI, The Grok Differentiator of other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive, real-time access to X data.
TO published post to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk’s future plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the owner of
Kantrowitz says conversations about X will form the core of Grok’s summaries. In other words, Grok won’t look at the text of the article, even if that’s what people are discussing on the platform. This could be a problem in terms of painting a true picture of the news being shared, since what people talk about on X may be their reactions or opinions, not the news itself. Kantrowitz calls the measure “controversial,” but admits there is an opportunity.
Journalists already have to deal with AI news summaries in other areas as well, including startups. For example, the new Arc web browser includes a AI summary function and former Twitter engineers are building a AI news summary service called Particle. It remains to be seen how this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves. Kantrowitz believes users may be interested in delving deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued, she writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will close as page views decline due to AI summaries, leaving fewer sources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long term.
For that reason, some news publishers are closing deals with artificial intelligence providers such as OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Others, like Axel Springerhe APand The world, have also announced similar measures. In the case of X, he can access the news through the conversation around it and without having to associate to access the content of the news. This is both clever and worrying, the latter from a misinformation standpoint.
Grok Stories are now available to Premium Premium It starts at $8 per month, if you pay on the web and not through app stores.