X, formerly Twitter will publish new terms of service; one change has everyone talking. A new term in the terms of service is going to let X use any material posted by a user to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Everyone is worried, especially all the creative professionals, about what is going to be done with their work and personal lives.
X's AI Data Usage: What You Need to Know
Where the terms of service now make patently clear is that by submitting content to the website, users license X to use any data submitted thereto on a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free basis for purposes of training and, among other things, generative models. In short, using X to further AI technology could implicitly mean consenting to content.
According to CNN, this has instilled fear into the minds of creatives and artists, as well as everyday users of the application. Fear for artistic creatives is that work may be uploaded into algorithms that may eventually replace human creativity in the future.
There is also the fear that any specific information, for example, photos or sensitive details, will be harvested for usage within machine learning. In this regard, some X users have started deleting personal content, such as photos, from their profiles already.
Legislative Battles That Need to be Solved in Texas
If users don't like these terms, they might end up in court - namely, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts in Tarrant County. The venues already have a reputation for having handled cases involving X and for being sympathetic toward conservative activists.
Interestingly, Tarrant County is more than 100 miles from X's new headquarters in Austin, Texas. The decision made over this venue has been questioned as it may pose logistical barriers to those interested in opposing X's new terms.
Data Privacy and User Control
The revised terms of X have caused recent controversy, in large part over how data privacy and AI training are handled within the platform. Previously, users had only to click on a few settings within the privacy settings offered on the platform to decline the use of their data to train AI.
Locate the update function for "settings" and "privacy and safety," then click the box in the section called "data sharing and personalization" to turn off content sharing for use in training Grok, X's AI chatbot.
The new terms are not explicit about whether users may opt out. The language of the new agreement doesn't differentiate a public from a private account, so it's unclear just what control users might have over their own personal data. They are giving X broad licensing rights that could be used to train AI on all the content on the platforms without any clear restrictions.
Increasing Anxiety Over AI
It is not alone among companies that have come under fire over their uses of AI. Google and Microsoft also came under heavy fire for the sometimes unpredictable and usually contentious behavior of their AI tools.
X's AI chatbot, Grok, has already generated controversy by spreading misinformation and producing violent, fake images of public figures.
While broad licensing terms are not uncommon for social media apps, it's the specificity of X's amended policy that has drawn much attention.
"X's terms cut through the ambiguity; all of a sudden, you have clarity on what the company intends to do with this data and train it on for AI," observes Alex Fink, CEO of Otherweb.
Opting Out of X's AI Policy
How much control X users will have over their data remains unclear as Nov. 15 approaches. Legal language, by and large, tends to give companies broad rights that they do little to exercise in practice, but whether the power to opt out of AI training will be an option for X users after the said date cannot be said. Only time will tell how X will balance its AI ambition with user concerns.
Related Article: X Users Can Prevent Grok From Training on Their Posts
