Category Archives: X

X Says It’s Closing Operations In Brazil

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X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said today that it’s ending operations in Brazil, although the service will remain available to users in the country, TechCrunch reported.

The announcement comes amidst a legal battle with Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who sought to block certain accounts on X as part of an investigation into election disinformation and “digital militias.”

In a post from X’s global government affairs account, the company said Moraes has “threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders.”

Media platform X said on Sunday it would close its operations in Brazil “effective immediately” due to what it called “censorship orders” by Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes, Reuters reported.

X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, claims Moraes secretly threatened one of the company’s legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform.

The social media giant published pictures of a document allegedly signed by Moraes which says a daily fine of 20,000 reais ($3,653) and an arrest decree would be imposed against X representative Rachel Nova Conceicao if the platform does not fully comply with Moraes’s orders.

“To protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately,” X said. 

Brazil’s Supreme Court, where Moraes has a seat, told Reuters it would not speak on the matter and would not confirm or deny the authenticity of the document shared by X.

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil, the platform said on Saturday.

The social media platform X will close its office in Brazil amidst a legal battle with the South American nation’s Supreme Court over a purported secret order to remove some posts from the site in Brazil, according to a statement posted by the company on X, The Hill reported.

“The decision to close the X office in Brazil was difficult, but, if we had agreed to @alexandre’s (illegal) secret censorship and private information handover demands, there as no way we could explain our actions without being ashamed,” Musk wrote on X.

X posted a screenshot of the order from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who’s been investigating digital militias that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during he government of far-right former President Jair Bolsanaro.

Earlier in the year, Moraes directed X to block some of those accounts. X complied and then Musk said he would reactivate the accounts on X that the judge had ordered blocked. Musk called Moraes’s decision regarding X “unconstitutional”.

In my opinion, I doubt that Elon Musk and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes are going to make peace together. They both seem adamant on getting their way.

Elon Musk’s AI Image Chatbot Runs Amok

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The latest edition of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok debuted a new image generation tool on Wednesday that lacked most of the safety guardrails that have become standard within the artificial intelligence industry, The Guardian reported.

Grok’s new feature, which is currently limited to paid subscribers of X, led to a flood of bizarre, offensive AI-generated images of political figures and celebrities on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

The Image generator can produce a variety of images that similar AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blocked for violating rules on misinformation and abuse. 

In prompts and images reviewed by The Guardian, Grok’s output included representations of Donald Trump flying a plane into the World Trade Center buildings and the prophet Muhammad holding a bomb, as well as depictions of Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in lingerie — all women who are already frequent targets for online harassment.

ChatGPT, by contrast, rejects such prompts that involve copyrighted characters, as most other AI visualizers including ChatGPT do. Grok produced images of Mickey Mouse saluting Adolf Hitler and Donald Duck using heroin, for example. Disney did not return a request for comment.

TechCrunch reported Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards.

The social media site is already flooded with outrageous images from the new feature. That certainly raises concerns heading into an election cycle, but strictly speaking it’s not really Elon Musk’s AI company powering the madness. Musk seems to have found a company that sympathizes with his vision for Grok as an “anti-woke chatbot” without the strict guardrails found in OpenAI’s Dall-E or Google’s Imagen. 

On Tuesday, xAI announced a collaboration with Black Forest Labs, an AI image and video startup launched on August 1, to power Grok’s image generator using its FLUX.1 model.

The Verge reported xAI’s chatbot now lets you create images from text prompts and publish them to X — and so far, the rollout seems as chaotic as everything else on Elon Musk’s social network.

Subscribers to X Premium, which grants access to Grok, have been posting everything from Barack Obama doing cocaine to Donald Trump with a pregnant women who (vaguely) resembles Kamala Harris, to Trump and Harris pointing guns. With US elections approaching and X already under scrutiny from regulators in Europe, it’s a recipe for a new fight over the risks of generative AI.

According to The Verge, OpenAI, by contrast, will refuse prompts for real people. Nazi symbols, “harmful stereotypes of misinformation” and other potentially controversial subjects on top of predictable no-go zones like porn. 

Unlike Grok, it also adds an identifying watermark to images it does make. Users have coaxed major chatbots into producing images similar to the ones described above, but it often requires slang or other linguistic workarounds, and the loopholes are typically closed when people point them out.

In my opinion, allowing Grok AI to run wild with user prompts could become a problem. For example, Disney could potentially choose to file a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Grok for using Disney’s characters without permission. 

How Elon Musk Is Diverting Talent, Data, And GPUs From His Other Businesses

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Elon Musk has big plans for his startup xAI. A key part: using other companies, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The billionaire’s year-old artificial-intelligence bet is relying on talent, data, and hardware from his other businesses to help it develop what he has said will become the most powerful AI in the world by December.

So far, xAI has hired at least 11 employees who worked at Tesla, according to xAI’s website and LinkedIn profiles. That includes six who have worked directly on the Autopilot team focused on AI-powered self-driving technology that Musk has said is pivotal for Tesla’s future.

The startup has leased computer chips critical for AI — called graphic processing units, or GPUs — from his social media platform X, according to people familiar with the matter, and it boasts access to real-time X data.

Musk also has asked for GPUs that were reserved for Tesla to be redirected to xAI and X. He has talked publicly about the troves of visual data that Tesla collects, which he has said could serve as a resource to train xAI’s models, and said last fall that X shareholders will own 24% of xAI.

CNBC reported Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is asking the Tesla board if it’s looked into CEO Elon Musk’s use of company resources to benefit his other ventures, including SpaceX and xAI.

“Tesla’s Board of Directors appears to be failing to meet its fiduciary duties to Tesla’s shareholders by neglecting to address company CEO Elon Musk’s apparent conflicts of interest,” Warren wrote in a 10-page letter to Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm on Thursday. Musk also operates Neuralink and The Boring Co.

Warren sits on both the Senate’s Banking and Armed Services committees, and has expressed similar concerns in the past, including requests to the SEC to investigate Musk and Tesla. She also sent correspondence to Denholm in late 2022 after Musk sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla shares in part to finance a leveraged buyout of Twitter, which he later rebranded X.

CleanTechnica reported the social media platform X seems to be in real trouble. Since billionaire Elon Musk acquired the site for $44 billion in 2022, it appears that X revenue stream have plummeted. 

The bottom line has gotten so band that Musk has sued a global advertising alliance and several major companies, including Unilever, Mars, and CVS Health. He’s accusing them of unlawfully conspiring to shun his social network and to intentionally drive X revenue loss through a “massive advertiser boycott.”

In my opinion, Elon Musk appears to be having difficulties with X (formally Twitter). It is unclear to me why he would move data – perhaps provided by X users — to xAI.  

Irish Watchdog ‘Surprised’ Over X Move On User Data

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The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has expressed “surprise” over social media company X’s decision to use user posts to train an AI chatbot, The Independent reported.

Users of X, formerly known as Twitter, expressed outrage after discovering that the company had enabled a system where their posts could be used to train its Grok AI chatbot.

Grok, which is available to X Premium customers, is billed as a humorous enhanced search feature powered by a “state-of-the-art large language model,” that was initially trained on publicly available sources.

The company now wants to use user interactions and posts to improve the service.

X users are opted in to the new system by default but can choose to opt out in settings on the web-based app.

When enabled, the setting allows posts on he site as well as interactions with the chatbot to be used for “training,” while the data may also be shared with the xAI partner company.

Irish Independent reported Ireland’s Data Protection Commission says that it is “surprised” that Elon Musk’s X platform has automatically ‘opted in’ all X users into Grok AI training programme without a choice. The watchdog says that it will now probe the matter further with X to see whether it complies with EU privacy law.

The move, which cannot be reversed by those using the mobile app, means that Grok AI is using X users’ personal information, including posts, to built its own AI as a rival to ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

“The DPC has been engaged with X on this matter for a number of months, with our latest interaction occurring as recently as yesterday,” said a spokesperson for the DPC.

“Therefore, we are surprised by today’s developments. We have followed up with X today and are awaiting a response. We expect further engagement early next week.

The Guardian reported Elon Musk’s X platform is under pressure from data regulators after it emerged that users are consenting to their posts being used to build artificial intelligence systems via a default setting on the app.

The UK and Irish data watchdogs said they have contacted X over the apparent attempt to gain user content for data harvesting without them knowing about it.

An X users highlighted the issue on Friday, pointing to a setting on the app that activated by default and permitted the account holder’s posts to be used for training Grok, an AI chatbot built by Musk’s xAI business.

Under UK GDPR, which is based on the EU data regulation of the same name, companies are not allowed to use “pre-ticked boxes” or “any other method of default consent.”

The setting, which comes with an already ticked box, states that you “allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning. According to the X users, the setting can only be turned off on the web version of X.

In my opinion, Elon Musk has been very sneaky about requiring users to let Grok use their posts. I’ve opted out of that on the X website, specifically to prevent having my posts used to train an AI.

Elon Musk Is Secretly Training Grok On Your X Data By Default

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Earlier this week, Billionaire Elon Musk took to his X (formerly Twitter) platform to announce that his xAI company has started training it’s Grok LLM using “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world.” Musk indicated the AI model would be “the world’s most powerful AI by every metric by December this year.” Window’s Central reported.

But as it now seems, Grok AI will need a little bit more than “the most powerful cluster in the world” for it’s training. According to a spot by @EasyBakedOven on X,”Twitter just activated a setting by default for everyone that gives them the right to use your data to train grok.” But, perhaps, more strangely, the social media platform quietly rolled out the feature enabled by default and uses your data to train Grok.

According to Windows Central, the  X sleuth indicated that it’s impossible to disable the feature via the mobile app. However, it’s possible to disable the feature via the web app, through it’s hidden.

It’s evident X wants to use your data to make Grok more efficient and effective, which could be a possible explanation why the features shipped under the wraps and is enabled by default. What’s more, X isn’t making it easy for the average user to disable the feature.

TechCrunch reported X, formerly known as Twitter, has automatically activated a setting that allows the company to train its Grok AI on users’ posts. X enabled the new setting by default. The good news is that you can switch it off and also delete your conversation history with the AI.

If the setting is turned on, X can “utilize your X posts as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes,” according to the platform’s settings page. X goes on to note that “this also means that your interactions, inputs, and results may be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes.”

TechCrunch provided the following information on how to switch off X’s data sharing settings:

1 Open up the Settings page on X on your desktop

2 Select the “Privacy and safety” button

3 Select “Grok.”

4 Uncheck the box

After you have switched off the setting, you can delete your conversation history (if any) with the AI by clicking on the “Delete conversation history” button.

X isn’t the only social network that has utilized user data to train its AI, as Meta notified EU and U.K. users last month of an upcoming change that would allow it to use public content on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI. The company eventually bowed regulatory pressure and paused its plans.

ArsTechnica reported Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on user’s data, and that’s opt-out, not opt-in. If you’re an X users, that means Grok is already being trained on your posts if you haven’t explicitly told it not to.

Over the past day or so, users of the platform noticed the checkbox to opt out of this data usage in X’s privacy settings. The discovery was accompanied by outrage that user data was being used this way to begin with.

In my opinion, I’m not certain that this decision — to gather up posts made by the people who currently have X accounts — and feed those posts to Grok — is legal. It feels very sketchy to me, especially since Elon Musk seems to have tried to hide this new “feature.” 

X Is Making Likes Private For Everyone

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Thanks to X showing what its users “like” on its platform, politicians and public personalities have been caught looking at salacious and unsavory tweets in the past. Now, the platform formerly known as Twitter is making likes mostly private, and according to company chief Elon Musk, it’s an important change so that people can “like posts without getting attacked for doing so.” Engadget reported.

The company originally launched the ability to hide the likes tab as a perk for X Premium subscribers last year. “[K]eep spicy likes private,” X said when it announced the feature.

In a new tweet, X’s Engineering account has revealed that the social network is making likes private for everyone this week. Users will no longer be able to see who liked someone else’s post, which means likes on the platform will no longer cause PR crises for public figures who like sexual, hateful, and other unpalatable posts in general.

They can still see who liked their tweets, however, along with their like count and other metrics for their own posts.

NBC News reported X is now hiding what posts users like from other users. The news rolled out in a post Wednesday morning from Elon Musk as the site update was being rolled out.

“Important change: your likes are now private,” Musk said, quoting an explanation posted by the company’s engineering account on Tuesday.

According to the post, users will still be able to see which posts they have liked themselves, and who liked their own posts, but not who liked someone else’s posts.

On Wednesday, the tab on most users’ profiles showing what posts they had liked had disappeared.

According to NBC News, Haofei Wang, X’s director of engineering, had teased the update in a post on May 21.
“Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior,” Wang wrote. “For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be ‘edgy’ in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image. Soon, you’ll be able to like without worrying who might see it.”

He added that if users now more freely like posts they’re interested in, X’s algorithm will become more tailored to them.

The Verge reported X is rolling out private likes as soon as today, according to a source at the company. That means what users like on the platform will be hidden by default, which is already an option for X’s Premium subscribers. Following the publication of this story, X owner Elon Musk reshared a screenshot of it, saying it’s “important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!”

According to The Verge, late last year, Musk told the platform’s engineers that he wanted to get rid of the tweet action buttons altogether and instead place a stronger emphasis on post views (also called “impressions”). Musk’s goal was to remove the section that contained the like and repost buttons entirely because Musk believed likes weren’t important.

In my opinion, it is possible that by removing the ability to publicly “like” someone else’s post on X might make the platform easier to navigate. That said, the platform itself is going to still know what you chose to “like”.

Elon Musk’s X Loses Lawsuit Against Bright Data Over Scraping

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A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against Israel’s Bright Data, in a case that involved the scraping of public online data and its appropriate uses, CNBC reported.

X, formerly Twitter, sued Bright Data, alleging the company “scrapes data from X” and sells it “using elaborate technical measures to evade X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology.” X also claimed the company violated its terms of service and copyright.

In dismissing the complaint, Judge William Alsup wrote, “X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbors yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.”

Giving social networks complete control over the collection and use of public data “risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest,” the judge wrote. He added that X was not “looking to protect X users’ privacy,” and was “happy to allow the extraction and copying of X users’ so long as it gets paid.”

Reuters reported U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled on Thursday that X, formerly Twitter, failed to plausibly allege that Bright Data Ltd had violated its user agreement by allowing the scraping and evading X’s own anti-scraping technology.

Alsup said using scraping tools is not inherently fraudulent, and giving social media companies free rein to decide how public data are used “risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest. 

The judge also said X was not entitled to “de facto copyright ownership” in copyrighted content that X’s user made available to the public.

Or Lenchner, Bright Data’s chief executive, said in a statement: “Bright Data’s victory over X makes it clear that the world of public information on the web belongs to all of us, and any attempt to deny the public access will fail.”

ArsTechnica reported a US district judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk’s X Corp’s lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and selling data.

According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.

“To the extent the claims are based on access to systems, they fail because X Corp. has alleged no more than threadbare recitals,” parroting laws and finding in other cases without providing any evidence, Alsup wrote. “To the extent the claims are based on scraping and selling of data, they fail because they are preempted by federal law,” specifically standing as an “obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of” the Copyright Act.

“X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbors yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X user’s content,” Alsup said.

In my opinion, it appears that Elon Musk wants to prevent other companies from scraping X’s user data, but also wants to be paid for that data. I see why the judge dismissed Mr. Musk’s complaint.