X to allow third parties to train their AI models with social media users’ data

Elon Musk’s social media mouthpiece X (formerly known as Twitter) has updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to direct disputes to a federal court in Texas and allow third parties to train AIs on user posts.

The updates will allow “third-party collaborators” access to user data, although it appears there will be some form of opt-out added. The specific paragraph reads:

The policy does not clarify the setting for opting out of data slurping. There is an option for data sharing with business partners, but this seems more about advertising than anything else. No doubt there’ll be something specific before long, which is opt out by default.

The change to X’s privacy policy comes into effect on November 15, 2024, and follows a growing trend of technology companies seeking to add revenue streams. For example, earlier this year, Reddit signed an AI training deal with Google after a paywall was thrown up around its API in 2023.

Goodness knows X could do with an additional revenue stream after several significant brands opted not to use the platform for advertising following its transformation under the leadership of Elon Musk. Infamously, Musk told advertisers to go “f$ck themselves” in 2023, which was undoubtedly a contributing factor to the exodus of advertisers. That, and allegedly seeing their brands next to questionable content.

And who could forget the time he threatened to sue Microsoft for allegedly using public Twitter data to train AI models, presumably referring to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, although he ultimately did not do this. As we noted at the time, any model trained on public internet data might have ingested information via Twitter’s API, which had historically been free until Musk started charging for API access.

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Also lurking in X’s updates is a “Liquidated Damages” section in the Terms of Service, which appears to be aimed at anyone seeking to scrape content from the platform. Access more than 1,000,000 posts in a 24-hour period, and X will demand $15,000 per million posts.

And if you have a dispute? It’s off to Texas, specifically the US District Court for the northern district of Texas.

While a move to Texas is not unexpected, considering X has moved its headquarters from San Francisco to the state, the selection of the northern district of Texas is curious, since X is now headquartered near Austin, Texas, which is covered by the western district of Texas US District Court. Some have theorized this is because the northern district is the seat of more conservative, business-friendly judges than the western district – criticizing it as “judge shopping.” ®