X has rolled out some new ways to use its Grok AI chatbot, with profile analysis now available to paying X Premium subscribers, as well as the capacity to ask Grok about any term or phrase by highlighting it in the app.
X first previewed its profile analysis option earlier this month, which adds a new “More about this account” option on the profile screen.
It’s only available on desktop at present, and again, it’s only available to X Premium subscribers (as with Grok overall).
But for those who have it, tapping on the button will then provide you with an AI generated summary of the profile, including a general description, an overview of how long the profile has been active, how many followers it has, and what it regularly posts about.
Okay, I’m tipping that this one wasn’t written by Grok, and that Elon’s crew had something to do with putting his own profile summary together. But you get the idea, the process is supposed to help you better understand who runs each account, and what they post about, with a simple summary.
Why is that helpful?
Well, it could help you decide on whether to follow a profile or not, while the additional context could also help you uncover bot and/or ragebait accounts.
For example, if you get an aggressive response to your post, and you head to that profile and tap through to get a Grok summary, you might then discover that the account has only been active for a few weeks, and as such, it may not be worth your time in response. It could also reveal political leanings, and other potential biases that might help to explain their response via added context.
There are a few ways in which this could be somewhat helpful, though I maintain that we’re still waiting for a killer use case for AI in social apps.
Meta’s chatbot is mostly superfluous, with some novelty gimmicks. TikTok’s bot experiments look much the same, while I have no idea why anyone would want to have a conversation with “My AI” on Snapchat. Same with Meta’s AI bot profiles on Messenger, which respond in a tone that replicates a celebrity.
Social media is exactly that, social, and how dedicated bot profiles add to that experience, I’m not sure. The capacity to have them create things for you is interesting, but again, I don’t see this being a major value add for most social networks.
Grok profile summaries are seemingly much the same. And while it could be handy to see what Grok says about a given profile, it mostly seems like a novelty value thing, that’ll wear off pretty quick.
But there could also be a value that I’m missing, having not used it as yet.
In addition to this, X Premium subscribers can also now highlight any text in stream, then ask Grok about it to get an AI-based explanation of that term or sentence.
So, in summary, if you’re one of the million or so people who are paying to use X, you now have a couple of new ways to pose questions to X’s AI, which is built on X posts and data.
Grok is available to all X Premium and Premium+ subscribers (not available in the “basic” package).
