X’s privacy policy confirms it will use public data to train AI models – According to Bloomberg, X’s recently modified privacy policy told users that it will now gather biometric data as well as individuals’ career and educational background/ history. However, it appears that this is not the only thing X intends to do with user data. According to a modification to another section of the policy, the firm also intends to use the information it gathers as well as other publicly available data to assist in training its machine learning and AI models.
The change was detected by Alex Ivanovs of Stackdiary, who has a history of discovering important revisions in internet firms’ terms of service, having previously discovered AI-related updates in Brave and Zoom. His post is currently trending on Y Combinator’s Hacker News discussion site.
We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy.
NEWS: X’s updated Privacy Policy has added a mention of using X data to train AI models 👀 pic.twitter.com/Bn5YyoeHjq
Elon Musk, the owner of X, has ambitions to enter the AI business with another startup, xAI, according to Ivanovs. This leads him to believe that Musk intends to use X as a data source for xAI, and that Musk’s recent tweet inviting journalists to write about X was an attempt to generate more interesting and relevant data to feed into the AI models.
Indeed, Musk has previously claimed that xAI will use “public tweets” to train its AI models, so this isn’t a huge jump. He accused other corporate behemoths of using Twitter to train their AI models, even threatening Microsoft with a lawsuit for suspected illegal usage of Twitter data. Musk also sued unknown companies for harvesting Twitter data, which might have been used to train artificial intelligence huge language models.
Furthermore, Ivanovs refers to wording on the xAI homepage that claims that, while it is a separate company from X Corp., it “will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”
Musk effectively confirmed the privacy policy change, responding to a post on X to emphasize that the idea is to use “just public data, no DMs or anything private.”
Following Musk’s acquisition of the social network, X no longer replies to press requests with a feces emoji. Instead, we got an auto-responder saying, “We’ll get back to you soon.” If it proves out to be the case, we’ll include X’s comment.
