SAN FRANCISCO — X.com users who agree to the platform’s new Terms of Service, effective Sept. 28, are authorizing the company to use their public posts to train its AI and machine learning models.
The new terms also allow the Elon Musk-led company formerly known as Twitter to collect users’ biometric data.
Twitter was one of the few major platforms to tolerate adult content and Musk has continued that policy since his October 2022 purchase of the company.
The AI-training changes to the ToS 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 data, 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 that 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 in reply to a post about the ToS change, clarifying that his plan is to use “just public data, no DMs or anything private.”