X, originally known as Twitter, is to embed Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, into the Explore section of the app with a new feature. An announcement and assets disclosed by X Engineering demonstrate that X Premium subscribers can access summaries of breaking stories from For You tab of Discover. The synopsis way of providing the concise summaries of the entries that are linked to any budding story; this helps users to remain updated with the relevant information.
“The For You” segment displays the latest trends and news, as determined by various participants from the X network. The feed is personalized to suit the interests of your social network. Supporting these we have additional proposal items, making it the central port where the X users can get in touch with the platform’s active dialogues without jumping between them.
As an example, on a TechCrunch reader’s personal domain (The For You) today you could see articles talking about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s recent security upgrade and the prominent AI burnout case. Once a X post story is tapped to explore a specific topic, you will instantly see its compact synopsis at the forefront of the page rendering a catchy summary.
Humorously, a message appears below that summary, warning: “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”
The idea of summarizing trends is not a new one, but it is new in terms of how the summaries are being handled. Under its prior leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, though not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with extra information and pin a representative tweet to provide further context. However, Twitter’s rollout was haphazard, with some trends getting written up and others not.
These summaries, called Grok’s Stories, capture all the top stories that are currently featured on the “For You” section.
We embed Grok, our chatbot, to premium plans in order to persuade users to do subscription. Subscribers of Premium and top of the range Premium+ plans can make use of Grok by hitting the central button found at the bottom of the app interface. Grok is characterized by sarcastic and “rebellious” personality differentiating itself from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT by means of exclusive and real-time X integration.
A piece from tech reporter Alex Kantrowitz was recently posted on X , where he details the plans of CEO Elon Musk for the AI-powered news distribution on the platform, as epitomized in a mailed exchange with the founder of X .
Kantrowitz argues that the core of Grok’s summaries will be around the buzz around X that is taking place on X. Of great note is that Grok will shun the analysis of actual article text; instead, it will focus on the conversations happening on platform X. While this is a controversial route, it shows concreteness. However, Kantrowitz highlights a potential drawback: Grok’s users’ discussion may sometimes be inaccurate as those comments are more often based on personal reactions, one’s subjective opinions and not a fact itself.
The media industry is now struggling to keep up with AI-driven news summaries that are being developed and launched by both major players and startups. Most importantly, the latest version of Arc will have an AI summarization feature, while engineers who used to work at Twitter are developing the new AI-powered news summary service named Particle. The effect of this trend on traffic to these sites is also yet to be ascertained. Kantrowitz mentions that users can further explore into the primary documents later when the interest is already sparked. Nonetheless, it is equally possible that some news outlets may suffer a decrease in page views due to AI summaries, and thus losing the diversity in sources as time goes on.
