X announced this week that artificial intelligence bots will be allowed to contribute to Community Notes, its feature that fact-checks posts.
But on Thursday, Elon Musk’s platform made it clear: while AI will soon be creating Notes, it will never be allowed to rate those Notes — an important line in the sand that will safeguard against rogue models boosting bogus fact-checks. In short, humans will remain in charge, Keith Coleman, X’s VP of Product, told The Washington Post.
AI models “make mistakes, they hallucinate things, they can be biased. Everyone’s aware of these issues,” Coleman said.
And those issues could have become a big problem, considering how Community Notes works. The program allows users to propose fact checks to posts, and if those Notes get enough users to rally behind them, they are attached to the post-in-question for all users. If AI bots are allowed to both create Notes and then rate them, X could quickly be littered with untrue fact checks — and that is what the platform is working to avoid, Coleman noted.
Instead, he said allowing AI bots to only create Notes will make the program better, thanks to the speed in which AI can scan information.
“They’re good at reviewing lots of content, scrounging the web, looking for resources,” he said. “It’s very believable that they could be good at saying, ‘Hey, this video has been around since 2013’ or ‘There have been 10,000 notes shown on this [claim] in the past.’”
Community Notes, which has become a staple feature of X since Musk bought the platform in late 2022, has since been copied by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, during a conversation with Joe Rogan earlier this year, compared his company’s previous third-party fact checker team to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” saying it led to “too much censorship.”
Now, it will be interesting to see if Meta and other competitors follow suit once again, allowing AI to create, but not rate, their own fact checks.
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