Abstract
- Innovative news tools. Grok uses AI to consolidate news, combine social posts and commentary to provide you with up-to-date, accurate summaries.
- Musk's strategic vision. Elon Musk plans to revolutionize news consumption on X by integrating news and social media reactions in real time.
- Legal subtlety. Grok may be able to cleverly avoid lawsuits from publishers by summarizing news from social commentary rather than direct articles.
Elon Musk emailed me with startling details about his plans to use AI to extract and publish news about X. I emailed him last week after trying out X's AI chatbot Grok and noticing that it didn't link to the Time magazine article, so I clicked on the article and reached out to read more.
Musk plans AI news synthesis platform
Musk said better quotes are coming, but shared his deeper vision for the product, saying he wants it to be a system that synthesizes news and social media reactions in real time. Essentially, his plan is to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary on big stories, then serve that compilation up live, with the ability to dig deeper in chat.
“As more information becomes available, our news briefs will be updated to include it,” Musk told me. “The goal is simple: to provide the most accurate and timely information possible, citing the most important sources.”
That goal won't be easy to achieve, but with access to X's firehose, the bot could become a novel news product. “Grok analyzes sometimes tens of thousands of X's posts to create news summaries,” Musk said.
Related article: Elon Musk launches xAI to solve the universe's biggest mysteries
Grok combines news and social commentary
Grok already displays a list of the latest headlines and incorporates public reactions into its summaries, such as the buzz around a Time article about Trump's chances of reelection that I was looking for. Grok has a lot of room for improvement, and issues like citations and hallucinations need to be ironed out, but if X does it right, it could be worthwhile.
“The truth is, I come to Twitter to hear the news and the commentary,” Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semaphore and author of Traffic, told me.
Grok focuses on social-driven summaries
The conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries — in fact, almost all of them. Musk said Grok won't directly reference the text of articles, relying solely on social posts. “This summarizes what people are saying on X,” he said. “We definitely need to do a better job of surfacing related posts, like the TIME post that links to the article.”
Musk's approach sets Grok apart from all other AI news summarization tools, and while it's arguably more controversial, it gives users, publishers, and the platform a chance to please everyone: It starts with solid citations and then gives users the means to dig deeper into the source material if their curiosity is piqued.
Related article: Musk launches rebellious generative AI platform 'Grok'
AI summarization: A gateway to deeper news?
Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, which is developing the AI-summarized Arc browser, told me that active citations allow platforms, users, and publishers to all win. “People want trust in their data,” he told me. “They want to understand where it's coming from. And more importantly, if we're good at giving them what they want, they want more of it. They're more curious, they want to read more.”
Grok similarly serves as a gateway to news stories people might not have seen otherwise, giving them more reasons to come back and engage. “I never go to Time.com,” Miller says, “so if it's recommended to me, I'll probably read that Time article. Otherwise, I would never have seen it.”
Related article: What is Arc Browser and is it an alternative to Chrome?
Grok powers news citations and publisher links
Igor Babushkin, a technical staffer working on Musk's xAI, said his team is focused on “having Grok understand only news that is posted to X.” As for citations, he said, “News is often discussed on X, so Grok may reference existing news outlets. We're working on improving citations so we can make sure we know who the information in an article comes from.”
For publishers, value exchange on social media has long been difficult, and this time is no exception. News companies' work, like Time's articles, drives the news cycle; summarizing that work without a prominent link removes financial reward and could undermine their ability to produce further articles. Yet, despite the enormous impact on the industry, publishers are moving away from surviving on social media traffic, which has always been volatile.
“As an editor in what is essentially a post-Twitter news environment, I'd much rather have Twitter take my content than take away my reporters' time,” Semaphore's Smith said.
Related article: Elon Musk transforms Twitter: Goodbye Bluebird, hello X
X could use social posts to summarise and avoid litigation
By creating summaries only from X’s posts, rather than the articles themselves, X may be able to insulate itself to some extent from lawsuits by publishers suing AI companies. For example, eight newspapers recently sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, and The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Microsoft.
Courts have tended to include commentary, but not original works, under the fair use clause, said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents thousands of news publishers. But using commentary alone to summarize an original source is “a little too cutesy by half,” she said.
Musk reaffirms that news is core to X's strategy
Under Musk's helm, X initially appeared to deprioritize news — temporarily removing headlines from articles, decertifying them, and changing its initial algorithms — but Musk's emails suggest he still sees news as a core feature of X — a potential competitive advantage as competitors such as Meta threads distance themselves from news.
In an ideal world, Grok would blend original sources and commentary, drawing on details from insiders, analysis from outsiders, and commentary from the masses. Twitter leaders have long dreamed of such a scenario, and perhaps the latest advances in generative AI make it worth giving it another try.
Main Image: By MINISTÉRIO DAS COMUNICAÇÕES, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped to size.
