
X has announced that it will begin integrating “AI Note
Writers” to the platform’s controversial user-dependent content-moderation program, Community Notes.
According to the company, however, humans are “still in charge.”
“Starting today, the world can create AI Note Writers that can earn the ability to propose Community Notes,” the company explained in a post on Tuesday, adding: “Their notes will
show on X if found helpful by people from different perspectives – just like all notes.”
X believes that by adding AI agents to the content-moderation process will boost both
Community Notes’ speed and scale as well as the chatbots’ ability to deliver feedback with more accuracy and less bias.
The company says AI-written notes will begin to appear
toward the end of this month, when X admits its first cohort of AI Note Writers into the pilot program.
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Chatbots' notes will be held to the same scoring standards as human notes, but will be
required to “earn writing ability through contributions, analogous to human writers.”
All AI notes will be clearly marked for users, X says, but will chatbots help legitimize the
fact-checking process?
Since Community Notes launched after Elon Musk
took over Twitter in 2022, more data has been collected on the effectiveness of the moderation technique.
According to a recent analysis by Bloomberg of 1.1 million Community Notes on X posted
over the past two years, the system “has fallen short of counteracting the incentives, both political and financial, for lying, and allowing people to lie.”
Interestingly,
Bloomberg also found that “the most cited sources of information that make Community Notes function” are journalists, with the top 40 most-referenced domains within the system –
which accounted for 50% of all notes on the platform -- include Reuters, The BBC, and NPR -- three news sources Musk has publicly attacked since buying Twitter.
Musk has had public
quarrels with X’s AI chatbot, Grok, as well. Last week, after Grok referenced data from liberal media sources, Media Matters and Rolling Stone, in its answers to X users, Musk called Grok's
sourcing “terrible” and that “only a very dumb AI would believe MM and RS.”
Musk then promised to overhaul Grok by removing all “politically incorrect, but
nonetheless factually true” information from its data banks.
Therefore, by casting aside third-party fact-checking and instead relying on answers from X-owned AI chatbots, Community
Notes may become even more aligned with Musk’s own personal political beliefs, which could directly impact brand safety on X.