Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories
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 modelsto write community notes to clarify or correct contentious posts, before they are approved for publication by users. 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 humans would review AI-generated notes and the note would appear only if people with a variety of viewpoints 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.'
But Collins said the system was already open to abuse and that AI agents working on community notes could allow 'the industrial manipulation of what people see and decide to trust' on the platform, which has about 600 million users.
It is the latest pushback against human factcheckers by US tech firms. Last month Google said user-created fact checks, including by professional factchecking organisations, would be deprioritised in its search results. It said such checks were 'no longer providing significant additional value for users'. In January, Meta announced it was scrapping human factcheckers in the US and would adopt its own community notes system on Instagram, Facebook and Threads.
X's research paper outlining its new factchecking system criticised professional factchecking as often slow and limited in scale and said it 'lacks trust by large sections of the public'.
AI-created community notes 'have the potential to be faster to produce, less effort to generate, and of high quality', it said. Human and AI-written notes would be submitted into the same pool and X users would vote for which were most useful and should appear on the platform.
AI would draft 'a neutral well-evidenced summary', the research paper said. Trust in community notes 'stems not from who drafts the notes, but from the people that evaluate them,' it said.
But Andy Dudfield, the head of AI at the UK factchecking organisation Full Fact, said: 'These plans risk increasing the already significant burden on human reviewers to check even more draft Notes, opening the door to a worrying and plausible situation in which Notes could be drafted, reviewed, and published entirely by AI without the careful consideration that human input provides.'
Samuel Stockwell, a research associate at the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute, said: 'AI can help factcheckers process the huge volumes of claims flowing daily through social media, but much will depend on the quality of safeguards X puts in place against the risk that these AI 'note writers' could hallucinate and amplify misinformation in their outputs. AI chatbots often struggle with nuance and context, but are good at confidently providing answers that sound persuasive even when untrue. That could be a dangerous combination if not effectively addressed by the platform.'
Researchers have found that people perceived human-authored community notes as significantly more trustworthy than simple misinformation flags.
An analysis of several hundred misleading posts on X in the run up to last year's presidential election found that in three-quarters of cases, accurate community notes were not being displayed, indicating they were not being upvoted by users. These misleading posts, including claims that Democrats were importing illegal voters and the 2020 presidential election was stolen, amassed more than 2bn views, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
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The National Insurance raid, as well as the increased minimum wage, has forced Mr Vinney to 'pull up the drawbridge in terms of hiring'. He adds: 'It means you have to be much more careful about wage increases, which is not what you want to be doing in a growing business. National Insurance and minimum wage changes are preventing us from being able to reward people for hard work.' Britain, Mr Vinney says, is 'a country where it is not a good place to be an entrepreneur', and that anyone wanting to start a business should do so elsewhere. 'Small businesses are an engine for growth. But we have been abandoned.' Private school parents Television presenter, Ana Boulter, 47, has two children at independent schools. She has been left feeling betrayed by Labour's decision to impose 20pc VAT on school fees. Ms Boulter's daughter is autistic, and, like many parents, she worries local state schools do not have the resources or expertise to deal with her child's needs. She is now considering home schooling after her children's fees rose by 21pc in a year. She also takes issue with the perception that parents choose to send their children to private schools simply to make them get ahead in life. She says: 'The people who are really buying advantage are those who can afford to buy houses next to outstanding state schools. What parents in the independent sector are doing is buying an education that suits their children's needs which they believe the state can't provide. 'The way ministers have spoken about private education, do they not think about how this affects the children? They are actively pushing a group of people out and saying, 'You don't matter, you don't count, you are not important, you are insignificant'. You are a political smear on our outlook.' Winners Few would describe themselves as 'winners' from Ms Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer's tenure so far, but some groups have undeniably been given extra support. Net zero supporters Ed Miliband and his Department for Energy Security and Net Zero was a surprising winner of Ms Reeves's first spending review. The Warm Homes Discount, which some speculated would be cut, was expanded. And the budget for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which doles out £7,500 grants to households who want to install a heat pump, was also raised by £1.8bn. It comes too late for Tim Adams, 67, who has already made use of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), a now-defunct scheme which paid early adopters for generating renewable energy over a seven-year period. Mr Adams believes Labour's decision to continue funding grants specifically for heat pumps, rather than generalised payback schemes, is a shift in the right direction. He says: 'The RHI was in some ways more generous, but now the £7,500 comes directly off the cost, and that will be preferable to those who can't pay the money up front. 'Solar panels and batteries stack up in a way that you should be able to do it on your own, and in the same way, electric car prices have come down to the point you'd have to question how much that still needs to be subsidised. ' People are so negative about heat pumps – a lot of it through misunderstanding. They don't understand what the potential is, and I think that's a huge problem for the Government. The messaging just isn't cutting through.' Public sector workers One of Labour's first acts in Government was to hand public sector workers a pay rise – to the tune of £6.9bn. The decision to capitulate to pay review bodies briefly quelled frequent strikes by teachers and doctors. However, unions have warned that further industrial action is likely unless the Government agrees to an above-inflation pay rise in 2026. Dr Erin Gourley, a psychiatric registrar, welcomed her 5.4pc pay award this year. The 33-year-old mother-of-two says: 'Wes Streeting [the Health Secretary] is saying lots of positive things, and that's a lot better than what we were getting under the last government.' However, she still feels worse off than before the election. 'I would say finances have progressively become more stretched over the year, and we are having to be a bit more cautious with our spending,' she says. 'One of the things that can make it worse is that I do a lot of out-of-hours work, a lot of evenings, nights and weekends, and my childcare needs are more than most jobs. Balancing that is particularly difficult.' The British Medical Association estimates resident doctor pay remains 21pc lower today in real terms than it was in 2008. Doctors in Dr Gourley's pay grade earn around £61,825 a year, according to the BMA. Dr Gourley, who lives in Coventry, believes Labour must reverse this decline. 'In terms of where I was in 2015 when I started working, I don't think the pay has increased commensurately with the skills I've taken on as I've become more senior,' she says. A 6pc pay rise was awarded to junior doctors, 3.6pc for other NHS staff, 3.25pc for members of the Armed Forces, and 4pc for teachers and prison officers. Senior civil servants will also receive a 3.25pc pay rise, while school staff such as teaching assistants, caterers and caretakers will receive 3.2pc. The Government was approached for comment.
