X, formerly Twitter, now uses Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to power a feature that summarizes personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to one announcement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, X Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of X posts related to each trending story that appears under the For You tab in Explore.
The For You page showcases the news and stories shared on the X platform and popular in your network, along with other recommended content. It’s among the first stops for X users who want to keep track of what’s being said on the platform without having to spend a lot of time scrolling through their timeline.
For example, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today might include stories about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s security upgrade, and burnout among AI engineers. As you tap on each story to view the associated X posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, offering an overview of the topic.
In the case of the AI burnout story, for example, the Grok-based summary begins: “AI engineers face burnout and rushed installations due to the competitive race in the tech industry as companies prioritize satisfying investors rather than solving real problems’. After briefly touching on the AI “rat race” problem, the story concludes by saying that “critics argue that proper safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be afterthoughts in pursuing AI investments…”
Humorously, a message appears below this summary, warning: “Groc may make mistakes, verify his results.”
The idea of summarizing trends is not new, but it is new in terms of how summaries are handled. Under his previous leadership, Twitter began adding titles and descriptions to its trends in 2020, though not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself will annotate some of its daily trends with additional information and pin a representative tweet to provide further content. However, Twitter’s rollout has been haphazard, with some trends picking up and others not.
Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, summarize all the top news on the For You page.
Access to xAI Grok’s chatbot is intended to be a selling point to push users to purchase premium memberships. With the Premium and top tier Premium+ plans, users can access Grok by tapping on the bottom middle button of the app. An aggressive and “revolutionary” AI that differentiates Grok from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data.
ONE post published on X Friday by tech reporter Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk’s further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with X’s owner.
Kantrowitz says the conversations in X will form the core of Grok’s summaries. Grock won’t look at the text of the article, in other words, even if that’s what people are discussing on the platform. This could be a problem in terms of creating a true picture of the news being shared, as what people are discussing on X may be their reactions or opinions, not the news itself. Kantrowitz calls the move “controversial,” but admits there’s an opportunity there.
Journalists already have to deal with AI news summaries in other fields, including startups. For example, Arc’s new web browser includes an AI digest feature, and ex-Twitter engineers are building an AI news digest service called Particle. How this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves remains to be seen. Kantrowitz believes users may be interested in going “deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views decline due to AI digests, leaving fewer sources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long run.
For this reason, some news publishers are entering into agreements with AI providers such as OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Others, such as Axel SpringerThe APand Le Monde, have also announced similar moves. In X’s case, he can get the news through the conversation around it — and without having to cooperate to access the news content itself. This is both clever and alarming, the latter in terms of misinformation.
Grok’s Stories is now available to Premium X subscribers. Access to Premium starts at $8 per month if you pay on the web rather than through the app stores.
