Elon Musk announced this Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict the reading of tweets in order to reduce the massive use of data by third parties to feed artificial intelligence models.
The social network will limit reading to 6,000 messages per day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified users and 300 for new unverified accounts.
These limits should be raised “soon” to 8,000, 800 and 400 respectively, according to the platform owner.
The announcement doesn’t specify whether that daily tweet count applies to selecting specific posts or encompasses all posts that appear, for example, by scrolling down the home screen timeline, browsing threads, or reviewing tweet replies.
On the same Saturday, a couple of hours before Musk revealed those limits, thousands of users reported problems accessing the social network on the Downdetector monitoring page, and they seemed to continue, although to a lesser extent, after the announcement.
On the social network itself, some affected people indicated today that the application gave them the following error messages: “The limit has been exceeded” and “Tweets cannot be displayed.”
Data collection for artificial intelligence (AI) models
The decision was made “to remedy the extreme levels of data collection and manipulation of the system,” Musk explained in a tweet.
The day before, he had already announced that from now on it would not be possible to read messages on the social network without connecting to a personal account and giving out his identifiers.
“Hundreds of organizations (perhaps more) were extremely aggressively extracting data from Twitter, to the point of affecting the actual user experience,” said Musk, the majority shareholder and chief executive of the San Francisco, California-based group.
By limiting the number of tweets that can be read per account, Musk seeks to prevent these organizations from collecting massive amounts of data that is used in particular to develop so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI) models.
To develop a generative model capable of humanly responding to everyday language requests, these companies must “train” the interface by giving it examples of conversations.
“Almost all companies that do AI, from start-ups to some of the largest corporations in the world, were extracting vast amounts of data,” insisted the tycoon.
“It’s quite galling to have to urgently add a large number of servers just to facilitate the outrageous valuation of some AI startups,” he added.
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.
Reddit raises prices for third-party developers
Twitter is not the only one facing the consequences of the explosion of generative AI and the development of services based on linguistic models.
In mid-June, the Reddit discussion platform raised the prices it charges third-party developers for using the data and conversations posted on the social network.
The decision provoked protests, since until then these platforms had provided access to public data on their site at moderate prices or for free.
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