Elon Musk says he wants Grok to create news summaries by relying solely on X posts, without looking at article text, and improved story citations are coming
That is how you get widespread bias and disinformation. — #gigo Bluesky: @nzpom.com : These were some early examples of Grok testing that were accidentally released into production Kevin Veale / @krveale.bsky.social : Hey remember when Grok invented an Iranian invasion of Israel and that somebody came back from the dead. [embedded post] @anthonyintx.bsky.social : We already tried this — www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11... [embedded post] Avishay Ben-Sasson-Gordis / @avishaybsg.bsky.social : The funny thing is that this wouldn't be *quite* as insane a proposition before Musk broke twitter's ability to function as an independent source of news [embedded post] @born2bemild.bsky.social : The Brothers Grimm: Puss In Boots ➡️ Grok: Pussy In Bio. Gareth Williams / @notgareth.bsky.social : In Australia we call that Sky News [embedded post] Michael Paul / @mjpaul.bsky.social : news articles are already news summaries tho [embedded post] @caprine.bsky.social : An AI chat bot became grossly racist and antisimetic in a single day in 2016 why would this be any different? how much lead is in his veins he's going to explode during an MRI seriously somebody quarantine this idiot [embedded post] Nate Schenkkan / @nateschenkkan.bsky.social : “Given the challenges we face to our fundamental shared understanding of the world, I would like to destroy it” [embedded post] Kilgore Trout / @kilgoretrout.bsky.social : like setting up a buffet in the portajohns at burning man [embedded post] Wes Miller / @getwired.bsky.social : Human centipede of news. [embedded post] @smartsmears.bsky.social : LLM Bots summarizing posts that porn bots and crypto bots make about real articles without reading them sounds like the kind of amazing proposition that you can only find on X: The Everything App [embedded post] @blackamazon.bsky.social : LOL god this is hell [embedded post] @legalba.bsky.social : I, too, like to ask my psychotic acquaintance to tell me things he vaguely knows about, where he heard it “in a pub from a mate who's cousin with this guy who knew the guy who it happened to”. [embedded post] E.W. Niedermeyer / @niedermeyer.io : A bot that summarizes what the users of a racist social media platform say about stories it hasn't actually read definitely sounds worthy of the $6 billion xAI is reportedly raising at a $18b valuation. [embedded post] X: Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : New: @elonmusk emailed me about his plan for AI news on X. The idea is to use AI to blend breaking news and commentary, building real-time summaries of events. Then you can go deeper via chat on Grok. Here's the full story! I'll be talking more about this on Big Technology... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : Elon Musk, news publisher. Except instead of paying people to find news he'll take what you're saying about the news, right here on Twitter, and summarize it via his Grok AI. Which, honestly, is an idea* I don't completely hate. [image] Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : Elon Musk's plan “is to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary around big stories, present the compilation live, and allow you to go deeper via chat,” @Kantrowitz reports https://www.bigtechnology.com/ ... Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : FWIW this sounds a lot like Moments, a product Twitter used to have, but compiled via AI instead of human curators Irvin McCullough / @mcculloughirvin : Honestly, this could work. The AI-curated newsletters I subscribe to are getting to be good; all depends entirely on execution Robert Scoble / @scobleizer : @Kantrowitz @elonmusk Thanks! Can't wait to see Grok get a lot better. I've been writing about Grok, along these lines, a bit too. Ken Yeung / @thekenyeung : Wow, Musk emailed you @Kantrowitz? https://www.bigtechnology.com/ ... Chris Moran / @chrismoranuk : “Conversation on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries — or, really almost all of it.” That's the news solved with AI then. https://www.bigtechnology.com/ ... @nxthompson : “His plan is to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary around big stories, present the compilation live, and allow you to go deeper via chat.” Fascinating. @elonmusk's plan for news here. https://www.bigtechnology.com/ ... Hamza Shaban / @hshaban : My critical first impression: this sounds like regurgitated news product that makes me think of imitation crab meat See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Grok was introduced to X Premium+ users with an emphasis on access to X’s real-time data, making the proposed sourcing rule an extension of its platform-native positioning rather than a conventional news-search product Grok’s X-data-based rollout.
The proposal arrives after X’s Explore page promoted a false Iran-Israel headline while Musk was promising Grok-made personalized news, so the quality of its input corpus is central to whether citations can establish trust a false headline on X Explore.
First-order effects
- If adopted, Grok news summaries would treat X posts—not the underlying reporting—as their evidence base; publishers’ article text would be excluded from the summarization path.
- Improved story citations could make Grok’s sourcing more visible, but they would document a narrower, platform-controlled source set.
Second-order effects
- Posts that gain visibility on X would have greater influence over Grok’s news framing, increasing the stakes of ranking, verification, and moderation decisions on the platform.
- Publishers would have less direct influence over how their reporting is represented in Grok outputs if the system cites posts about a story rather than reading the reporting itself.
Third-order effects
- This is a test of whether AI news interfaces can operate as closed-loop distribution systems: a platform’s social feed becomes both the source material and the surface where summaries are consumed.
- If such designs spread, citation standards may shift from simply naming sources toward showing provenance and source diversity—an emerging form of generative editorial debt.
The trend: AI news products are increasingly turning proprietary, real-time platform feeds into inference inputs, concentrating editorial influence in the systems that rank and summarize them.