Elon Musk threatens Microsoft with a lawsuit, claims AI trained on Twitter data

The Twitter chief alleged Microsoft scraped information from the platform to train its AI and sell the data to others

Microsoft has been threatened with a lawsuit from Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who claimed the Big Tech firm “illegally” trained its artificial intelligence on Twitter data.

On April 19, Musk tweeted that it was “lawsuit time” in response to a post reporting that Microsoft would cease supporting Twitter on April 25 across its online social advertising tools, Smart Campaigns and Multi-platform.

NEWS: Microsoft drops Twitter from its advertising platform as they refuse to pay Twitter’s API fees. pic.twitter.com/dY6YBIxjo5

— X Daily News (@xDaily) April 19, 2023

The Twitter boss alleged Microsoft “trained illegally using Twitter data,” implying the firm mined user tweets to help train its AI-powered applications.

Microsoft didn’t explain why it was winding down Twitter support although Twitter’s API fees skyrocketed from $0 to $42,000 a month and in some cases are priced upwards of $200,000 per month, according to a March report from Wired.

Musk made further allegations that Microsoft is “demonetizing” Twitter data by removing advertisements and “then selling our data to others.”

I’m curious if you have a long term plan here. I understand charging for the API, but I think that one thing that had been great about Twitter in the past is it’s ability to function across the internet. In many cases this move is killing traffic to Twitter itself from outside…

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) April 19, 2023

Microsoft’s decision to ditch Twitter means its customers will lose access to their Twitter accounts through its tools in addition to being able to create, manage, view and schedule Tweets.

Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn remain available to Microsoft customers, its website states.

Microsoft’s decision comes a few months after Twitter stopped providing free access to the Twitter API for versions 1.1 and 2.

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 🧵

— Developers (@XDevelopers) February 2, 2023

Academics have been hit hard by the huge price swing. Over 17,500 academic papers have been based on Twitter data since 2020. Now they’ve been largely priced out.

SCOOP: Twitter’s new API access starts at $42,000 a month for 0.3% of Twitter’s data. My latest for @WIRED speaks to researchers who say that’s a non-starter https://t.co/RfGyWqpIgF

— Chris Stokel-Walker (@stokel) March 10, 2023

The software company is now reportedly developing its own AI chips to power ChatGPT to deal with the rising development costs for in-house and OpenAI projects.

With a $2.15 trillion valuation, Microsoft is behind only Apple as the second-largest company in the world by market cap, according to Google Finance.

Source: Cointelegraph