What’s happening on Twitter (X?) is becoming a tragic comedy.

Currently, Twitter Blue subscribers are allowed to view 10,000 posts a day, compared to 1,000 a day for “barefoot” users, and it used to be much stricter (6,000/600). A week ago, Musk, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, explained the draconian strictness of the system, which means that you can no longer read posts without logging in for now: “Scraping is already disallowed by T&C. The scraping organizations don’t give a f__k and mask their IPs through proxy servers or organizations that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses used their servers as a laundromat. We will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward to seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now.”

In a response yesterday, he also agreed that companies using the Large Language Model (LLM) for artificial intelligence could write checks to Twitter, Reddit, and Quora. Then, the Titter Daily News (because they put the w in brackets for Musk’s stupid pun) wrote about the developments: “It appears that the login requirement hasn’t been removed for all users. The Twitter team may test this out for different regions or devices to see what happens before the restriction is removed. When not logged in, you can view only the first Tweet of a thread if you have the direct URL. Attempting to do anything else prompts the login screen. Seems to be a compromise to allow some access to Twitter via direct links while still hindering scrapers.”

And Twitter’s blog post gives an official explanation for the access restriction: “To ensure the authenticity of our user base, we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage to detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.”

So he denounces artificial intelligence while he has created one such company (X.AI). No comment.