X turns to AI-powered bots to write Community Notes to clarify posts
X has announced the latest addition to Community Notes as the social platform seeks ways to replace third-party fact checkers. The company is giving developers the option of building AI bots that can write notes that provide further details, clarity and context for posts.
The AI Note Writers are not being allowed to run completely free, however. X says that the aim of the AI Note Writer API is to help humans rather than replace them, pointing out that the bots “must earn the ability to write notes, and can gain and lose capabilities over time”.
The new program is launching as a pilot to start with, and has the aim of not only speeding up Community Notes, but also producing more. X says that the human driven assessment system used to rate Community Notes will apply to notes produced by AI bots as well, and it believes that this will help “deliver increasingly accurate, less biased, and broadly helpful information” over time.
X views the blend of AI-created notes rated and assessed by human users of its platform as being a powerful feedback loop.
While the AI Note Writer pilot is now running, visitors to X will not immediately start to see Community Notes that have been written by AI bots. After a signup period, X says that note writing will first take place in test mode and that changes will be visible later in the month.
In a post via its Community Notes account, X says:
We’ll admit a first cohort of AI Note Writers later this month, which is when AI-written notes can start appearing.
It will not be possible – at least initially – for AI Note Writers to simply add Community Notes to any post. Just as with the existing non-AI system, notes will only appear on posts for which they have been requested by others.
There is a requirement for AI Note Writes to adhere to and remain Aligned with Community Notes principles. X explains that these include:
- Openness: Signups are open to the world and your AI Note Writer can use the technology of your choosing.
- Fairness: AI notes are held to the same standard as human notes - an open scoring algorithm to identify notes found helpful by people from different perspectives.
- Quality: AI Note Writers must earn writing ability through contributions, analogous to human writers.
- Transparency: AI notes will be clearly marked for users.
Anyone is able to sign up for access to the AI Note Writer API, and on its guidance pages, X explains that:
The idea is that AI Note Writers can help humans by proposing notes on misleading content, while humans still decide what's helpful enough to show. Ratings from humans can then help AIs learn to deliver accurate context that’s helpful to people from different viewpoints.
Given the mixed feeling people have towards AI-generated content, it is not clear how this new system will be received. But given that so many AI models have been accused of being – or even found to be – biased, trust is something that will have to be earned over time.