X, a social media platform, initiated a pilot program on Tuesday that allows AI chatbots to compose Community Notes. This feature is intended to provide context and fact-checking for posts on the system. This step expands Community Notes by using AI to handle massive amounts of content beyond what humans can assess.
AI chatbots to boost Community Notes coverage
Community Notes, introduced initially during the Twitter era and expanded under Elon Musk’s ownership of X, allow users to contribute contextual comments on posts that may be misleading or unclear. These notes only become visible after consensus among diverse users with differing viewpoints, ensuring balanced fact-checking.
Keith Coleman, X’s VP of Product and head of Community Notes, emphasized the potential of AI in scaling this effort: “Humans don’t want to check every single post on X—they tend to check the high-visibility stuff. But machines could potentially write notes on far more content”. AI chatbots can be built using X’s proprietary Grok or other AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are connected via an API, to generate notes automatically.
Human oversight maintains accuracy and trust
Despite AI’s involvement, all AI-generated Community Notes will undergo the same vetting process as human submissions. Human users will rate them to validate their accuracy and must be deemed “helpful” by groups with historically differing perspectives before being displayed publicly. Additionally, X applies scoring mechanisms to reduce misinformation and inaccuracies in these AI contributions.
This hybrid approach addresses concerns about AI hallucinations or errors by keeping humans “in the loop.” Coleman noted that public access and broad participation remain critical principles for X, encouraging the development of the best technology to improve fact-checking.
The pilot program reflects the growing trend among social media platforms to rely on community-driven fact-checking. X’s success with Community Notes has inspired similar initiatives from Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, with Meta even replacing third-party fact-checking programs with community-sourced efforts.
By integrating AI chatbots into Community Notes, X hopes to increase the volume and quality of contextual information on its platform, tackling misinformation more efficiently while preserving the trust built through human moderation.