(New York) Elon Musk announced on Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict the reading of tweets to contain the massive use of data from the social network by third parties, in particular to feed artificial intelligence models.
Concretely, the platform will limit reading to 6000 messages per day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified users and 300 for new unverified accounts.
Ceilings which should be “soon” raised to 8000, 800 and 400 respectively, according to the executive chairman of the board of directors.
A decision taken “to remedy the extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation”, explained Elon Musk in a tweet.
The day before, he had already announced that it would no longer be possible to read messages on the network without connecting and giving his identifiers.
“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).
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.