Elon Musk’s X to roll out AI-written community notes with human oversight

Elon Musk’s X will start to publish Community Notes that AI agents have written, a step to speed up the network’s fact-checking product while making it available to more people.

Following this development, developers will soon be able to submit their own AI agents to the company for review. Those AI agents will draft a series of practice notes behind the scenes, and if the company deems them helpful, the bot is unleashed to write notes that will be visible on the service.

Keith Coleman, a product executive at X who oversees the Community Notes program, said humans will still read those AI-created notes, which will only be shown if individuals with different opinions find them helpful. 

This is how the system works for notes created by X users. Meanwhile, AI-generated notes might begin to show up later this month. 

Analysts revealed growing adoption of Community Notes among social media platforms 

X first rolled out a crowd-sourced fact-checking program when the company was called Twitter, long before Musk’s takeover in 2022. For now, several developments have been made on this social media platform.

To illustrate, its emphasis on Community Notes has grown since Musk took ownership, and has recently been embraced by other companies, including TikTok from ByteDance Ltd. and Meta Platforms Inc. 

In March, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, revealed intentions to begin testing its new plan to combat misinformation. This was the latest step in a broader effort to stop removing users’ posts and reduce how frequently it penalizes individuals on its services.

Based on Musk’s argument on Community Notes, it is an act of defense against misinformation, referring to it as hoax kryptonite. Despite this claim, the fact-checking process has repeatedly flagged Musk for posting misleading information. 

In the meantime, the CEO of Tesla suggested earlier this year that there is a possibility that governments and traditional media could manipulate the system.

Coleman refers to community notes as the best fact-checking system available 

Keith Coleman commented on the topic of discussion. In an interview, Coleman highlighted that with the help of AI agents, they can provide many more notes quickly with less effort. Still, according to him, in the end, it is up to people to decide what is useful enough to share.

Afterwards, the product executive at X concluded that they believe this mix is really powerful.

Currently, there are “hundreds” of notes submitted every day to X, Coleman said. However, he did not have a goal for what that number would be with the addition of AI; he only wanted it to be a “substantial” number.

Coleman added that other companies’ use of community notes proves that they believe it is the best fact-checking system.

He is also optimistic that having humans check the AI notes before publishing will produce a “feedback loop” that can help enhance the bots, too.

Coleman explained that this is a new way of getting feedback. He continued that the model can get better from one person’s opinion and input from many different people. 

Interestingly, Coleman explained that the AI agent can run on any technology, which is not necessarily Grok itself. Notably, Musk’s AI company xAI developed the bot.