X’s recently updated privacy policy informed its users it will now collect biometric data in addition to users’ job and education history, Bloomberg spotted earlier this week. However it appears that’s not the one thing that X plans to do with user data. Based on an update to a different section of the policy, the corporate moreover plans to make use of the data it collects and other publicly available information to assist train its machine learning and AI models, it says.
The change was noticed by Alex Ivanovs of Stackdiary, who has a history of finding notable updates within the terms of service of tech corporations, having previously found AI-related updates in Brave and Zoom. His post is now trending on Y Combinator’s discussion forum Hacker News.
Specifically, the X policy change is present in section 2.1 and reads as follows:
As Ivanovs points out, X owner Elon Musk has ambitions to enter the AI market with one other company, xAI. This leads him to theorize that Musk likely intends to make use of X as a source of information for xAI — and maybe Musk’s recent tweet encouraging journalists to jot down on X was even an try and generate more interesting and useful data to feed into the AI models.
In truth, Musk has previously stated that xAI would use “public tweets” to coach its AI models, so this shouldn’t be much of a leap. He accused other tech giants of leveraging Twitter to coach their AI models, even threatening Microsoft with a possible lawsuit for alleged illegal use of Twitter data. Musk also filed suit against unknown entities for scraping Twitter data, which also can have been for the aim of coaching artificial intelligence large language models.
As well as, Ivanovs points to to the text on the xAI homepage which states that while it’s a separate company from X Corp., it “will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other corporations to make progress towards our mission.”
Musk essentially confirmed the privacy policy change, responding to a post on X to make clear that the plan is to make use of “just public data, no DMs or anything private.”
X now not responds to press requests with a poop emoji because it had following Musk’s takeover of the social network. As a substitute, we’ve received an auto-responder that claims “We’ll get back to you soon.” If that, indeed, seems to be true, we’ll add X’s comment.