Data is worth its weight in gold. Elon Musk, the sulphurous boss of Twitter, is perfectly aware of this. Having himself founded an artificial intelligence start-up called X.AI, the American billionaire knows the value of a freely accessible database, like Twitter. Because since yesterday, access to the social network has been greatly limited. From now on, each user will only be able to read a limited number of tweets per day, a number depending on the status of the user. In detail: 10,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 1000 for unverified users and 500 for new unverified accounts.
Announced by Elon Musk via a simple tweet, this measure is presented as a remedy “to the extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation”. It intervenes in a context of taking over the social network. The day before, Elon Musk had already announced that it was no longer possible to access the platform without logging in. “Hundreds of organizations (perhaps more) were gleaning data from Twitter very aggressively, to the point that it disrupted ordinary use” by Internet users, according to the majority shareholder of the group from San Francisco (California).
The announcement immediately caused an uproar. The billionaire then hastened to raise the limits, from 6000/600/300 to 8000/800/400, before reaching the current 10,000/1000/500. And to ironically declare: “reach the limit of views by reading posts on this limit of view”. Then “reach view limit complaining about view limit”. Before going further with another snub to his subscribers: “You wake up from a deep trance… Step away from the phone to see your friends and family”. What users responded by calling massively to redirect to Mastodon, Twitter’s competitor. The keyword
By limiting the number of tweets that can be read per account, Elon Musk seeks to prevent these organizations from collecting the massive amounts of data that are used in particular to develop so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. To develop a generative model capable of responding in a human-like way to everyday language requests, these companies must “train” the interface by giving it examples of conversations. “Almost all the companies that do AI, from start-ups to the largest groups in the world, were collecting large amounts of data,” insisted Elon Musk. “It’s a bit frustrating to have to urgently add a large number of servers just to justify the indecent valuation of certain AI start-ups,” he said. These additional servers were necessary for Twitter to support heavy traffic and use of the platform by software or bots, but not by ordinary users.
Twitter is not alone in dealing with the consequences of the acceleration of generative AI and the development of services built around language models. In mid-June, the discussion platform Reddit raised the prices it charges third-party developers to use data and conversations posted on the social network. The decision sparked an outcry, as these platforms have so far provided access to public data on their site at moderate prices or free of charge, to promote the development of an ecosystem.
