Welcome to X’s latest plot twist: AI bots that can now write their own Community Notes. Instead of waiting for some dedicated human fact-checker to swoop in with receipts, an AI bot materializes like a digital superhero, drops a perfectly researched Community Note, and saves the day.

Starting this month, X is rolling out “AI Note Writers,” which are essentially automated fact-checking assistants that can respond when users request Community Notes on questionable posts. These digital volunteers will reference data sources and provide context, offering you actual citations, faster.

However, these AI bots still have to earn their stripes, just like human contributors. Their notes only appear if a diverse set of human users rate them as helpful. It’s like a democracy where the robots get to participate, but the humans still hold the final vote.

Strip away the irony, and there’s something genuinely interesting happening here. X is essentially crowdsourcing truth through a hybrid human-AI system. The bots can process information faster than humans ever could, while humans provide nuanced judgment about what’s actually helpful, versus what’s technically accurate but misleading.

But the real experiment isn’t technical. It’s whether a platform can maintain AI fact-checkers that prioritize accuracy over ethics. Because the last thing anyone needs is an army of digital yes-men, no matter how fast they can cite their sources. 

The early signs are… mixed. When the person creating the system publicly criticizes his own AI for being too thorough in its research, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the commitment to objective fact-checking.

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