Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Pitches AI Use to Speed Up X Community Notes

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Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Pitches AI Use to Speed Up X Community Notes

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, has recently pitched the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and prediction market technology in order to speed up the production of the community notes on Elon Musk’s X platform.

Buterin’s comments came while speaking at the ongoing Korea Blockchain Week 2024. Community Notes is a special feature on the social media platform X that provides context to some of the misleading posts on the platform. This is a special feature on the X platform in order to avoid the misuse of information. Contributors can add “notes” to posts, and if a sufficient number of contributors mark a note as helpful, it will be displayed publicly beneath the post.

The Ethereum co-founder stated that although the X Community notes are very useful, they “don’t appear fast enough,” which leads to people getting misled before the fact check happens.

Buterin remarked that any delay required to provide context through Community Notes is “excessive”. However, the Ethereum co-founder suggested that prediction markets might offer a viable solution.

Prediction Markets are basically open markets allowing users to bet on specific outcomes, Vitalik Buterin gave the example of the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket wherein people bet on highly debated topics like politics, sports, and cryptocurrencies. The Ethereum co-founder said:

“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.”

Buterin suggested as soon as the post is published on the X platform, a question could be posed to assess if it deserves a community note. He also suggested using large AI language models and bots for placing small bets in this prediction market.

The Ethereum co-founder believes that it could speed up the process of fact-checking and getting to the truth faster while incentivizing the mechanism for the participants. “This mechanism will put the note at the end, and then it would reward people who predicted the result correctly, right? So over here, you basically have a vector with low cost but fast,” he explained.

Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Pitches AI Use to Speed Up X Community Notes