Elon Musk threatens Microsoft with 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 âillegallyâ trained its artificial intelligence on Twitter data.
On April 19, Musk tweeted that it was âlawsuit timeâ 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.
They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.
â Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023
The Twitter boss alleged Microsoft âtrained illegally using Twitter data,â implying the firm mined user tweets to help train its AI-powered applications.
Microsoft didnât explain why it was winding down Twitter support although Twitterâs 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 âdemonetizingâ Twitter data by removing advertisements and âthen selling our data to others.â
Iâm open to ideas, but ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isnât a winning solution
â Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023
Microsoftâs 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.
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Microsoftâs 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
â Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) 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 theyâve been largely priced out.
âI donât know if thereâs an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,â says @jhblackb, which was not a unique sentiment https://t.co/RfGyWqpIgF
â Chris Stokel-Walker ~ @[email protected] (@stokel) March 10, 2023
Cointelegraph contacted Microsoft, which declined to comment on Muskâs claims and its decision to scrap Twitter ads support.
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.
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