Hands-on with the new AI-powered personalized X feeds

It seems Bluesky isn’t the only company leaning into AI to help create personalized feeds. Amid a slate of recent product releases,

The company described the feature as one of the “biggest changes” to the app yet, saying it uses Grok’s AI to not only create these personalized schedules but also customize them for individual users.

Personalized Feeds arrives at the same time that X announced the shutdown of

At A representative for X explained to TechCrunch that custom timelines don’t rely on traditional signals like keywords or hashtags. Instead, the company said, Grok reads each post, understands it, and then adds topic labels. This was made possible thanks to AI models from Grok’s owner xAI, the company that acquired X last year, tying the two services together more closely.

At launch, custom timelines are only available to Premium subscribers on iOS. Android support is underway. All premium subscription tiers have access to this feature.

To use this feature, simply swipe right past the For You and Following feeds on the X, as well as any other personal lists you may have pinned. Then tap the plus sign (+) to choose the custom timelines you want to pin to the Home tab. (Choose wisely, because you can only pin up to 10 topics or lists!)

You can also reorder your chosen topics from the same screen.

Once installed, you can click on any of the feeds from the main cross-platform tab to browse through your installed custom feeds.

It is worth noting that the second position in each feed was filled with an ad – indicating that X had just found a way to increase its ad inventory. This is important: Company

X’s custom timelines offer over 75 category options

Primary topics are broad and fairly standard — high-level categories that resemble the type of sections you might find on news sites. These include topics such as business and finance, sports, technology, politics, stocks and economics, news, science, movies and TV, food and drink, art, real estate, home and garden, beauty, education, games, and others.

In addition to the broader sports category, there are also options to follow specific sports, including American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, mixed martial arts and wrestling, racing, motorsport, rugby, snow sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling, and the Olympics. (Oh, and e-sports, if you want to count that.)

Pop culture and technology topics also make up many of the available categories, with the first category allowing you to pin topics such as celebrities, music, concerts, country music, dance, electronic music, fashion, pop, K-pop, J-pop, podcast, hip-hop, and jazz.

Besides the technology category, you can also follow special interests like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies – two topics that are always popular on X. There are also categories for things that overlap with Elon Musk’s different works and interests, like robotics, software development, aerospace, and biotechnology.

Other general categories include things like animation, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage, family, shopping, mental health, and more.

News categories: war, crime, elections

Worth noting: The initial set of news-related topics comes with conflict in Iran, crime, and elections at the top of suggestions.

While this likely reflects current conversations taking place on X, it’s also an example of how a product decision can impact what news people see. A cleaner solution might be to organize the dozens of options into larger, high-level categories listed in alphabetical order, with subcategories appearing when you click on each. This would allow X to expand the “news” categories significantly beyond these three largest categories.

There may also be concern about these Grock timelines, which are ostensibly created to be politically neutral and “truth-seeking”, but in practice often distort correct information or amplify false information.

However, in our own tests, the custom timelines didn’t seem to be clearly skewed to the right or left. In a few test scripts, feeds were sourced from a range of outlets such as ABC, CBS, CSPAN, AP, Reuters, AFP, Daily Beast, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Puck, The Atlantic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Forbes, and the BBC (not all of which I follow), along with comments from various pundits.

It remains to be seen whether these personalized feeds will significantly change how people use X.

More often than not, people tend to want to see things they care about appear in their main algorithmic feed. But personalized feeds allow for the exploration of new interests or delving into topics only when they’re relevant – such as viewing a sports feed when the game is on. Combined with the new “Snooze Topics” option for the For You feed, you can more precisely customize X to your liking.