Buterin Backs AI for Faster X Community Notes

According to Buterin, the main complaint with X’s Community Notes is that they need to show up more quickly.

According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, predictive market technology and artificial intelligence may expedite the creation of Community Notes on the social media platform X.

Using the X feature Community Notes, users can clarify posts that can be misleading. Posts allow users to add “notes”. If sufficient users find the note helpful, it will be shown publicly beneath the post.

While these remarks are helpful, the main complaint of community notes, according to Buterin, who spoke at Korea Blockchain Week 2024, is that they “don’t appear fast enough,” which might lead to people being deceived before the notes occurred.

Other techniques can be made faster by predicting markets.

However long it takes to provide context for posts through Community Notes, Buterin said, it’s “too much.” The co-founder of Ethereum countered that prediction markets might hold the key to the solution.

Users can place bets on specific outcomes on open markets, known as prediction markets. Buterin cited Polymarket, a decentralized prediction site where users wager on hotly contested subjects, including sports, politics, and cryptocurrencies. Vitalik stated:

“One way to think about prediction markets is as a building block that can make other mechanisms faster. […] You take some existing mechanism, and then you make something much faster that gets incentivized to do as good a job as possible.” 

He said every time a post is posted, there can be a query asking if it deserves a community note. Buterin said users might place modest bets on this prediction market using bots and massive AI language models.

However, Buterin thinks this might expedite the discovery of the truth and incentivize players to use the system.

“It’s accurate that this method would place the note at the conclusion and reward those who properly predicted the outcome. Thus, you essentially have a vector over here that is quick and inexpensive,” he clarified.