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Major concerns have been raised following Elon Musk's purchase and sale of social media platform X for $45,000,000,000, as one AI expert has warned that your privacy could be at risk following the merger.
Many were left shocked following the 'sale' of X (formerly Twitter) last Friday, as owner Elon Musk technically departed with the social media site for a staggering price of $45 billion, which is officially a profit on the $44 billion he paid back in September 2022.
Not only was the price a complete surprise for many, as reports from just a few months ago outlined a 72% value decline for the site since Musk's purchase, but the buyer on the other side of the negotiating table also stunned people.
It turns out that the person that Elon Musk was handing over his social media empire to was, in actuality, Elon Musk himself, as his artificial intelligence firm xAI was the buyer in question.
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Musk explained that the deal had occurred in "an all-stock transaction" which combined the two companies into one entity, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion with $12 billion in debt.
He also illustrated that the futures of the two companies are "intertwined," adding that the merger will allow "the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent" of both entities to be 'combined'.
While this is undoubtedly great news for the companies themselves and any shareholders, AI experts have warned that this particular merger is a cause for concern when it comes to the privacy of X users.
As reported by Forbes, Camden Woollven, group head of AI product marketing at GRC International Group, has expressed her worries that the move is a threat to the privacy of users in conjunction with AI training data.
"The merger means that xAI now has direct access to all the data flowing through X," she explains. "We're talking about posts, messages, images, maybe even location data, depending on what people share.
"That data is likely being used to train Grok and any future AI tools they build."
In essence, it appears as if everything and anything you do on X from now on has the potential to be used in the training of xAI's software, and supposedly nothing is off limits.
That likely dramatically affects the freedom at which many would be comfortable using the platform, and you might want to think about what messages you're sending and the content of your tweets from now on, as that will all likely be fed into the brain of AI.
Similar concerns have also been raised by Chelsea Hopkins, social media manager at Fastholds, who indicates the potential inability for users to avoid their data being used to train AI models:
"This integration allows for AI-driven features to become more personalized, but it also increases the potential for extensive data collection and use, often without clear opt-out options being available to users."
While X might be a challenging asset on its own for Musk, it's utilization as an all-encompassing AI training data 'farm' of sorts could play a major role in the currently ongoing AI race.
