Who Is Your "Make It Better" Working For?

Grok's image editing feature on X has sparked controversy. The copyright issues of being able to edit uploaded images are obvious—but the more serious concern lies elsewhere.

When users command AI to "make it brighter," "more natural," or "just make it look good," those language patterns are being recorded. Recorded as data for converting vague intentions into concrete actions. On March 28, 2025, xAI acquired X in an all-stock transaction valuing the combined entity at $113 billion. The "verbalization of intent" that over 600 million users generate daily became a resource flowing directly into xAI's model development.

This is a new form of "shadow work." Ivan Illich coined the term in 1981 to describe unpaid labor that sustains industrial systems—housework, commuting, shopping, the stress of forced consumption. These activities don't contribute to subsistence; they serve as necessary complements to wage labor. Today, social media users' "posts" and "edit requests" function similarly: they contribute without direct compensation to AI companies' asset building. Moreover, the essence of that contribution has shifted from "generating content" to "verbalizing intent."

Why is intent data so valuable? Consider Tesla Optimus. The next step for humanoid robots is the ability to interpret ambiguous instructions like "bring me coffee, not too hot." Image editing prompts to Grok serve as precisely this kind of training data for ambiguous-to-concrete conversion. X = the intent input layer, xAI = the conversion engine, Optimus = the physical output layer. What Musk is building is a vertically integrated infrastructure that takes human intent as input and outputs machine action.

A Contrasting Design Philosophy

No ads. No selling data. Algorithms you can choose. Data you can take with you—through a decentralized framework called AT Protocol.

Bluesky's design philosophy begins with rejecting this extraction structure. Users' posts aren't siphoned off to train Bluesky's own models. "We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so," the company stated in November 2024. You choose your own feed algorithms. If you don't like your hosting provider, you can migrate to another service and take your data with you.

Of course, whether this design philosophy resonates with mainstream users—the answer, for now, is no. It's a value proposition for "technologists and ideological sympathizers," remaining invisible to general users. Furthermore, Bluesky's public data can still be scraped by third parties—the platform's robots.txt does not block such activities. The company is currently developing a consent framework, but AT Protocol cannot technically prevent external actors from harvesting public posts. Still, the contrast between X and Bluesky brings a fundamental question about platforms into sharp relief.

Who is the time and words we spend on social media working for? To whom do the fruits of that labor belong?

The Arrival of the Intentional Economy

The perspective of social media as an advertising industry has become commonplace. But we may be transitioning to the next stage.

What X is collecting is no longer "what you looked at." It's "what you want and how you express it." Shoshana Zuboff called this "behavioral surplus"—the data extracted beyond what's needed to improve services, repurposed for prediction and profit. But xAI's approach takes this further: by capturing how users articulate desires in natural language, it builds "structured data of intent" that dramatically enhances general-purpose AI's ability to understand and execute human commands. If advertising is a business that "buys attention," the next stage is a business that "predicts intent and designs action."

If we call this the "intentional economy," we have unknowingly become its workers—not producing content, but training machines to understand what we want. Decentralized platforms like Bluesky offer the option to refuse participation in this economy—at least by design philosophy, if not by technical guarantee.

The question is how many people know that option exists.

References：

xAI-X Merger Tech Startups. "Elon Musk's xAI acquires X in all-stock deal worth $33 billion, valuing the combined company at $113 billion." March 29, 2025. https://techstartups.com/2025/03/29/elon-musks-xai-acquires-x-in-all-stock-deal-worth-113-billion-valuing-the-combined-company-at-113-billion/ See also: Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. "xAI and X Merge in a $113 Billion Transaction." March 28, 2025. https://www.sullcrom.com/About/News-and-Events/Highlights/2025/March/xAI-X-Merge-113-Billion-Transaction

X Monthly Active Users Dean, Brian. "X (Twitter) Statistics: How Many People Use X?" Backlinko, updated September 23, 2025. https://backlinko.com/twitter-users Note: The "600 million" figure originates from Elon Musk's May 2024 post. As of July 2025, estimated MAU is approximately 561 million.

Bluesky's Generative AI Policy Malik, Aisha. "Unlike X, Bluesky says it won't train AI on your posts." TechCrunch, November 15, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/15/unlike-x-bluesky-says-it-wont-train-ai-on-your-posts/

Ivan Illich's "Shadow Work" Illich, Ivan. Shadow Work. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981. Full text available at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ivan-illich-shadow-work

Bluesky's robots.txt Policy Shanklin, Will. "The suddenly hot Bluesky says it won't train AI on your posts." Engadget, November 15, 2024. https://www.engadget.com/social-media/the-suddenly-hot-bluesky-says-it-wont-train-ai-on-your-posts-220034195.html Spokesperson Emily Liu's statement: "Bluesky is an open and public social network... Just as robots.txt files don't always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here."

Shoshana Zuboff's "Behavioral Surplus" (implicit reference) Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Related article: Who Owns Bluesky?