SAN FRANCISCO — X.com users who have agreed to the new Terms of Service effective Sept. 28 have authorized the company to use their public posts to train its AI and machine learning models.
The new ToS also allow the Elon Musk-led company formerly known as Twitter collect its users’ biometric data.
Twitter was one of the few major platforms to tolerate adult content in its main feed and Musk has continued that policy after his October 2022 purchase of the company.
The AI-training changes were first flagged by Stackdiary’s Alex Ivanov and reported last week by TechCrunch. Bloomberg first reported the biometric authorization, and also noted another change allowing X.com to mine user educational and employment date, which may be used to populate a LinkedIn competitor.
The AI policy change is found in section 2.1: “We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy.”
Ivanov noted that Musk has expressed interest in developing his xAI company, and this “leads him to theorize that Musk likely intends to use X as a source of data for xAI,” TechCrunch reported.
Musk posted on X.com a reply to a post about the ToS change, adding a clarification that his plan is to use “just public data, no DMs or anything private.”