X has launched a new AI-powered news feature called "Stories," which provides news summaries based on discussions on the platform, curated by its Grok chatbot.
What sets Stories apart from other news aggregators and summarizers is that it only uses user comments on news stories as a source, rather than the original articles themselves.
Musk explains that Grok sometimes analyzes "tens of thousands of X posts to render a news summary," with the goal to of providing "maximally accurate and timely information, citing the most significant sources."
But relying solely on user comments for news summaries carries significant risks, or as Musk would put it, it's "concerning." Commenters can misrepresent news, be taken out of context, or be deliberately manipulated.
There have been mishaps on X, ranging from inaccurate summaries of news stories to completely fabricated stories due to Grok AI misinterpreting user comments, supposedly generating first-hand news about current events.
Another challenge is properly citing sources. Musk admitted that Grok "needs to do a better job" of displaying relevant posts along with their original source.
It's also unclear how X will be able to prove that the news summaries Grok generates are actually based only on user comments. What happens if users post large portions of the original news to X along with their own comments?
But let us assume that X could really only summarize user comments in a balanced way, while keeping the original source visible and potentially driving more traffic to it.
This would make "Stories" an interesting feature with a unique selling point in the competitive news market, especially since publishers have largely moved away from social media as a traffic driver anyway.
However, given the current state of the technology and X's track record in AI, such a product seems far from ready. Stories is rolling out to X Premium users on the web and iOS.
Between Grok's AI news, Google punishing publishers with SGE on the horizon, and OpenAI and other AI companies rushing to create a new, financially unproven new content ecosystem, it's probably never been harder to be a publisher - lots of risks and limited opportunities in a shrinking market.
