Elon Musk made a surprising announcement on Twitter on April 19, threatening to sue Microsoft after the company dropped Twitter from its Smart Campaigns advertising platform. Starting on April 25, Microsoft advertising clients will not be able to access their Twitter accounts through Smart Campaigns.
According to a Wired report, Twitter is demanding fees ranging from $42,000 to $210,000 per month for companies to access its API, which allows third-party apps to interact with the social media service. Microsoft refused to pay these fees and was subsequently removed from the advertising platform.
Musk’s accusation is that Microsoft is using Twitter data, such as user tweets, to train its AI-powered programs without permission. He is apparently seeking compensation for this alleged activity. It is not known whether ChatGPT, the AI program developed by Microsoft-owned OpenAI, is among those accused of using Twitter data for training.
Microsoft has stated that ChatGPT was trained on public internet data and that it did not use Twitter’s API. Until earlier this year, Twitter’s API was available for free, and academics have used it to analyze conversations on the platform. According to Wired, over 17,500 academic papers have been published based on Twitter data since 2020, which supports Musk’s claim that Twitter is the world’s ‘de facto town square.’
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