Elon Musk threatens to sue Microsoft for allegedly using Twitter data to train AI

A new controversy involving the tech giant Microsoft had emerged when Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, said that the company has been scraping data from Twitter in order to illegally train its AI.

Musk posted a Tweet yesterday, April 19th, saying that it is “lawsuit time” in response to a post that said that Microsoft would stop supporting Twitter on April 25th via Multi-platform and Smart Campaigns — its online social advertising tools.

They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023

Microsoft used Twitter data to train AI illegally, claims Musk

The social network’s CEO added in a comment that he is open to ideas, but “ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isn’t a winning solution.”

According to Twitter’s relatively new boss, Microsoft has used the data to train AI illegally, only to sell it to others after it was done with it. Microsoft did not explain its decision to stop promoting Twitter via its tools. However, one reason might be that Twitter’s API fees recently skyrocketed from $0 to $42,000 monthly. In some cases, the price has even gone up to $200,000 per month, according to recent reports.

The company’s decision to ditch Twitter entirely means its users will no longer have access to their Twitter accounts through Microsoft’s tools. Consequently, they will also lose the ability to create, manage, view, or schedule their tweets.

However, Microsoft still supports other major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Microsoft’s reasons for dropping its support of Twitter remain unknown

For now, it remains questionable whether Microsoft ditched Twitter only because it stopped providing free access to its API. The decision to do so came months ago, and it was announced on February 2nd, while it went into effect on February 9th. Back then, Twitter devs said that on February 9th, they would no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. Instead, they said that a paid basic tier would be provided as an alternative.

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 🧵

— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 2, 2023

The following price swing was massive, and everyone who was using it was hit hard especially academics. Since 2020, more than 17,500 academic papers have been based on Twitter data, but after the company’s decision in February, they have been mostly priced out.

“I don’t know if there’s an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says @jhblackb, which was not a unique sentiment https://t.co/RfGyWqpIgF

— Chris Stokel-Walker ~ @stokel@infosec.exchange (@stokel) March 10, 2023

For the time being, Microsoft did not publish any official response to Musk’s lawsuit threat, and its representatives have declined to comment on the new developments.

It appears that Microsoft is currently focused on developing its own AI chips that would power ChatGPT in order to deal with the rising development costs for the OpenAI and in-house projects.

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