I’ve mentioned a few times how the AI community is overwhelmingly still using X. This is annoying because I’m fascinated with AI, and I like to know throughout the week what big changes are happening in the industry.

I stopped posting to Twitter over a decade ago. And more recently with Elon Musk, the X API has become more unpredictable and developer-hostile. (I still think Micro.blog should probably integrate with it anyway, so that users can prioritize their own blogs and still reach social followers with POSSE, but it’s a question I’ve tabled for now.)

I had even gotten into the habit of routinely checking X posts from folks in the AI industry. I really dislike this. There has to be a better way to keep up with news. Blogs like TechCrunch help, but only if an X post becomes important enough to bubble up to a broader audience.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been testing a new solution using ChatGPT scheduled tasks. I have a task that can run at regular intervals, finding any relevant posts and summarizing them for me. The prompt looks like this:

Find the latest public posts/tweets from notable OpenAI and Anthropic employees, summarize the most important updates, and include links to the original posts. Prioritize posts from the last 8 hours and focus on AI product, research, developer, policy, and company-relevant updates.

It’s working well. Here’s a screenshot from ChatGPT from over the weekend:

I don’t actually know how this works behind the scenes. I assume it’s downloading various profile pages while navigating around the dickovers that increasingly get in the way of signed-out reading on platforms like X and Reddit. But however it’s doing it, it works. It finds both X posts and company blog posts from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The larger point isn’t really about X. This workflow is just a specific example of what will become more common in the future, as AI assistants proactively help us save time, just as RSS feed readers help us avoid reloading a website home page over and over.

Social media powered by ads and algorithms is too addictive. The best way to avoid it is to not check mainstream social media at all, otherwise we’re inevitably going to get sucked into the infinite timeline. I think RSS feed readers and AI assistants will have an important role to play in helping us stay informed even as we’re mostly unplugged from the worst aspects of it all.