X, formerly Twitter, now uses Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that aggregates personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to one Notice and screenshots posted by the X engineering team on Friday, X’s premium subscribers can see a summary of the posts
The For You page displays the news and stories shared on the X platform that are popular in your network, as well as other suggested articles. It’s one of the first stops for X users who want to keep up with what’s being said on the platform without having to spend a long time scrolling through the timeline.
For example, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today might feature stories about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s security overhaul, and burnout among AI engineers. When you tap each story to view its associated X posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, providing an overview of the topic.
For example, in the case of the AI ​​burnout story, the summary prepared by Grok begins: “AI engineers are facing burnout and rushed adoptions due to competition in the technology industry as companies prioritize investor satisfaction over solving real problems.” After we After briefly addressing the problem of the AI ​​”rat race,” the story ends with the words: “Critics argue that when seeking AI investments, adequate safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be secondary…”
Humorously, a message appears below this summary warning: “Grok can make mistakes, check his results.”
The idea of ​​summarizing trends is not new, but it is new in terms of how the summaries are handled. Under his previous leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, but not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself would add additional information to some of its daily trends and pin a representative tweet to provide further context. However, Twitter’s adoption was haphazard as some trends were written down and others were not.
With Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, all the top news is summarized on the For You page.
Access to xAI’s chatbot Grok is intended to be a selling point to entice users to purchase premium subscriptions. With the top tier Premium and Premium+ plans, users can access Grok by tapping the button at the bottom center of the app. As a snappy and “rebellious” AI, Grok differs from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT with its exclusive real-time access to X-data.
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Kantrowitz says conversations about X will form the core of Grok’s summaries. In other words, Grok will not look at the text of the article, even if it is discussed on the platform. This could be a problem when it comes to painting a true picture of the news being shared, since people on that there are opportunities there.
Journalists in other areas, including startups, are already having to deal with AI news summaries. Arc’s new web browser includes an AI aggregation feature and, for example, former Twitter engineers are building an AI news aggregation service called Particle. It remains to be seen how this will affect traffic to the news sites themselves. Kantrowitz believes users may be interested in “diving deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. However, it is also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views decline due to AI summarization, leaving AI bots like Grok with fewer sources for summarization in the long run.
That’s why some news publishers are striking deals with AI providers, such as OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Axel Springer, the AP, Le Monde and others have also announced similar steps. In the case of This is both smart and worrying, the latter from a misinformation perspective.
Grok’s Stories are now available to Premium X subscribers. access to bonus starts at $8 per month if you pay online rather than through app stores.