Visitors to Twitter discovered Friday that the platform now requires people to log in to an existing account or set up an account to view its content, in what billionaire owner Elon Musk said is a "temporary emergency measure" because its data was getting "pillaged."
Mashable reported Friday that people who either did not have accounts or were signed out and were trying to access tweets on the platform were directed to a page that required them to sign in or create an account.
Musk responded to complaints Friday by saying the move was "temporary."
"Temporary emergency measure," Musk tweeted Friday afternoon. "We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
While Musk did not elaborate, the report said that one reason could be that artificial intelligence apps, like ChatGPT, could be using Twitter's code to "train" its language models, something Musk has criticized in the past.
PCMag’s encyclopedia defines an "AI model" as "[a]n artificial intelligence (AI) system that has been trained with varying amounts of predefined and undefined data as examples. AI programs primarily recognize patterns, and they provide results based on having previously reviewed many examples of the patterns that deal with the topic (voice recognition, machine vision, etc.). AI models use neural network architectures to learn and produce results."
Mashable's report said Musk stopped OpenAI access to the platform's data after acquiring it in the fall of 2022 because he felt they were paying enough for it.
OpenAI, however, developed a plugin for the ChatGPT app allowing users to "scrape data" from the Twitter platform and other websites.
Musk said the ability was "very concerning" in a June 17 post.
In addition to data concerns, the report also said Twitter reported in 2015 that the platform had "500 million" monthly visitors who accessed the site without logging into an account, which provides data that the platform can use to make money.
By requiring an account and login to view the content, Musk can then use that data in a pitch to potential advertisers to increase revenue, the report said.
The move also comes with a few unique problems, like blocking search results with Google and other applications that will run up against the same block as other nonmembers of the platform and take potential users away.
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