Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes

X says AI can supercharge community notes, but that comes with obvious risks.

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AI-based fact-checking? What could possibly go wrong?

In a research paper, X described the initiative as an "upgrade" while explaining everything that could possibly go wrong with AI-written community notes.

Oh, there's a list.

 

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Ars in 2025 does not routinely do great with their wording and fact-checking. It's becoming a little frustrating!

Your copy editor would point out it should be "well," or perhaps, awkwardly, "greatly."

 

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My copy editor <<1>> can eat a bag of dicks, because the English language is vast and if your meaning is towards the unambiguous end of the spectrum, who gives a fuck if it's well or great or greatly?

You'll note, of course, that I use plenty of colloquialisms throughout my postings -- it's more towards how I speak, and I feel no requirement, nor any particular draw towards the sort of formalism that cares if it's great or well.

(Although, to be entirely fair, "less" and "fewer" misusage is like nails on the chalkboard, even though they effectively mean the same thing. It's rare that using the "wrong" one leaves a question of meaning. Who knows. Everyone's got their own grammar gremlins, I suppose.)

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<<1>> I have been employed as a copy editor. Grammarly sort of killed that job; no one enjoys being corrected, and damn near err'body thinks they're a better writer than they are. In this year of Our Lord 2025, copy editor is a job far too many people view the same way they'd view "spell checker" as a job, when copy is more about macro structure than about "is a semi-colon appropriate, or should that be an em-dash or a comma?"

If you'll excuse me, my friend is going to come semi my colon. Happy 4th. MA(slightly less stupid and slightly more nice)A!

Don't mind me: I was just making a sly comment about the use of an adjective in place of an adverb while criticizing allegedly sloppy word choice

 

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I’m not going to add little guiding symbols, telling people how to read my post - most of them are not stupid, so I won’t treat them as such.

The tone of voice you use in your head is not always likely to be the one other people are hearing when they read your words on a screen devoid of non-verbal cues.

 

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Let’s not destroy the language and dumb down how we express ourselves, just so that we slightly reduce the chances of being misunderstood by morons.

Whether one assigns miscommunication of meaning to an inattentive receiver or inartful use of language by the sender makes for a good semantic Rorschach test. Ponder whether your belief in your linguistic craftsmanship is as unassailable as it appears you assume.

 

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Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum remarks on the English habit of saying outrageous things or the opposite of the truth completely po-faced, which only makes sense in context, or by intonation e.g.
Oh, I am sure you are right --> I agree with you.
Oh, I am sure you are right (eyebrow raised 2mm) ---> You are a complete blithering idiot.

I was brought up like this and it is still a conscious effort to write for US readers (and indeed those from the rest of the English seking world like Canada, Australia and India.)
But sometimes, in comment threads, I see examples where an obviously English writer has written, for other English readers, a comment which while purportedly praises something about the US, is deadly criticism. Irony. If you are a USian and get it (like my one time R&D director), you can bask in your own lingusitic superiority.

How AI is going to deal with the difference between the two languages I don't know. It'll probably be saying to itself "Life, don't talk to me about life." It's never going to "understand" Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope.

True UK superiority complex there, calling the former colonies the "English seeking" world... Oh, wait. Maybe I misinterpreted the typo.

Colon-right parenthetical mark.

I've said it before: there is a commonly quoted study claiming 93% of information conveyed via interpersonal communication is non-verbal. That study is imprecise, and even its authors say the real conclusion to be drawn from it is not 93%, but "a LOT more than people realize." LLMs simply do not have the inputs to receive, let alone correctly interpret, that information.

Funny you mention Trollope. I had an undergraduate class where we were assigned to analyze Barchester Towers from a perspective not covered in class. I chose to treat his descriptions of the character's actions as stage directions to show how they reinforced their character relationships--not the words they spoke, but their movements and gestures. In most cases, the actions clearly painted a different picture from the dialogue, illustrating that power of an arched eyebrow. I won't claim it was ground-breaking, but I got the only A in the class. Mind you, Trollope was himself a one-man word mill and assigning grand strategic meaning to his output is perhaps akin to anthropomorphizing LLMs in itself.

 

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Of course it was a typo. I'm in my 70s, it infuriates me that I fail to catch mistakes, but it irritates me when people start out with snark like "UK superiority complex" when you knew it wasn't.

Yes, I knew that, and the poke was intended to be a gentle tease.

Since he did not concern himself with the military, "strategic" is not the right word. However, he supported many "liberal" causes. His books attack snobbery and political corruption, church corruption and sectarianism, and for instance the default assumption of the rich that the poor are likely to be criminal. And his books drip irony for any intelligent middle class Victorian reading them. A superficial AI interpretation would give the exact opposite of his intentions.

Hence why I see it as an ironic comparison. Many perceived Trollope's focus on his daily word count took priority over each word carrying weight, and I see much LLM output to have as much or more empty filler than your typical high school essay.