Summary
- Social media platform X is bringing AI-generated news summaries, known as Stories, with help from Grok AI.
- Stories on X will offer trending news stories in the For You section, but it’s only available on iOS and the web for now.
- X CTO Elon Musk intends to blend breaking news and commentary using AI, ensuring the information is updated when more details are available.
While the AI segment is currently dominated by a few major names, such as OpenAI and Google, there are several places where you can experience AI chatbots, including on social media platform X, a.k.a. Twitter. Grok has been available on the platform for customers of its paid plans for a while. The platform has now announced a new feature for subscribers of its premium tier — Stories on X.
What is Grok?
What makes Grok unique is that it integrates deeply with X, accessing real-time data from the platform.
The announcement comes from the X Engineering account coupled with images detailing how Stories on X will work. Subscribers will find these new AI-generated summaries within the Explore tab’s For You section, which will be populated by trending news stories relevant to the user across various categories (via TechCrunch). Unfortunately, Stories on X is only available on iOS and the web for now, but we don’t think it will be too long before it appears on Android.
In addition to showing summaries for news articles in the For You section, Stories on X will also curate conversations between multiple users. For instance, a screenshot shared under the original tweet’s replies reveals how tweets or “online discussions” could appear as Stories, bringing a different dimension to news curation. Interestingly, the screenshots shared by the X Engineering team don’t show a description below each “story” in the For You feed, only displaying the headline instead.
What does the future of AI news look like on X?
TechCrunch also unearthed a tweet by Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz, who had an email conversation with X CTO Elon Musk about the future of AI news on the platform. Musk’s future plans reportedly involve meshing real news with the conversations happening on the platform and turning it “into a real-time synthesizer of news and social media reaction.”
However, based on the recent controversy surrounding NBA star Klay Thompson, we’re not too optimistic about Grok getting things right all the time. Grok acknowledges this shortcoming, too, with a disclaimer below these AI-generated summaries saying “Grok can make mistakes,” while also asking users to “verify its outputs.”
Musk further told Kantrowitz that the news summary would be updated as and when more information is available on the subject, adding that the aim is to “provide maximally accurate and timely information, citing the most significant sources.” There’s currently no word on whether these AI news summaries will be enabled for non-paying users of X at some point in the future.
