A decision by Elon Musk’s X social media platform to enlist artificial intelligence chatbots to drive factcheck risks increasing the promotion of “lies and conspiracy theories”, a former UK technology minister has warned, The Guardian reported.
Damian Collins accused Musk’s firm of “leaving it to bots to edit the news” after X announced on Tuesday that it would allow large language models to write community notes to clarify or correct contentious posts, before users approve them for publication. The notes have previously been written by humans.
X said using AI to write factchecking notes — which sit beneath some X posts – “advances the state of the art in improving information quality on the internet.”
Keith Coleman, the vice president of product at X, said human would review AI-generated notes and the note would appear only if people with a variety of viewpoint found it useful.
“We designed this pilot to be AI helping humans, with humans deciding,” he said. “We believe this can deliver both high quality and high trust. Additionally, we published a paper along with the launch of our pilot, co-authored with professors and researchers from MIT, University of Washington, Harvard and Stanford laying out why this combination of AI and humans is such a promising direction.”
Gizmodo reported: Artificial intelligence chatbots are known for regularly offering dubious information and hallucinated details, making them terrible prospects for the role of a fact-checker. And yet, Elon Musk’s X plans to deploy AI agents to help fill in the gaps on the notoriously slow-reacting Community Notes, with the AI generated notes appearing as soon as this month.
The new model will allow developers to submit AI agents to be reviewed by the company, according to a public announcement. The agents will be tested behind the scenes, made to write practice notes to see how they will perform. If they offer useful information, they’ll get the green light to get the approval of the human reviewers on Community Notes, and they still need to be found useful by people with a variety of viewpoints.
Developers submitting their own agents can be powered by an AI model, according to Bloomberg, so users won’t be locked into Grok despite the ties to Musk. The expectations from the company is that the AI-generated notes will significantly increase the number of notes being published on the platform.
ArsTechnica reported: Elon Musk’s arguably revolutionized social media fact-checking by rolling out “community notes,” which created a system to crowdsource diverse views on whether certain X posts were trustworthy or not.
But now, the platform plans to allow AI to write community notes, and that could potentially ruin whatever X users in the fact-checking system — which X has fully acknowledged.
In an ideal world, X described AI agents that speed up and increase the number of community notes added to incorrect posts, ramping up fact-checking efforts platform wide.