Twitter accuses Microsoft of misusing its data, foreshadowing a possible fight over AI
The Hindu
Twitter owner Elon Musk’s lawyer accused Microsoft of misusing the service’s data and demanded an audit.
A lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk accused Microsoft of misusing the service’s data and demanded an audit from the software giant.
The letter primarily addresses a seemingly narrow set of alleged infractions by Microsoft in drawing information from Twitter’s database of tweets. But the move could foreshadow more serious developments. Musk has previously accused Microsoft and its partner OpenAI in a tweet of “illegally” using Twitter data to develop sophisticated AI systems such as ChatGPT.
“Lawsuit time,” Musk wrote in that April tweet.
But the letter, signed by Musk lawyer Alex Spiro, tiptoed around that concern. It noted that Microsoft's agreement with Twitter barred it from overuse of the service's data such as exceeding “reasonable request volume" or “excessive or abusive usage.” Spiro then noted that “despite these limitations,” Microsoft had retrieved more than 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone.
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He provided no context for those numbers. The process of training AI systems requires enormous amounts of data such as written text, which AI algorithms scour for patterns that the AI can use to make sense of language and large bodies of knowledge.
In other respects, the letter primarily laid out a series of vaguely worded allegations. For instance, it noted that while Microsoft was required to inform Twitter about its intended use of the data, it failed to do so for six of the eight Microsoft apps that drew on information from the Twitter database.
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