AI Is Terrible at Detecting Misinformation. It Doesn’t Have to Be

Elon Musk has said he wants to make Twitter “the most accurate source of information in the world.” I am not convinced that he means it, but whether he does or not, he’s going to have to work on the problem; a lot of advertisers have already made that pretty clear. If he does nothing, they are out. And Musk has continued to tweet in ways that seem to indicate that he is generally on board with some kind of content moderation. 

The tech journalist Kara Swisher has speculated that Musk wants AI to help; on Twitter she wrote, rather plausibly, that Musk “is hoping to build an AI system that replaces [fired moderators] that will not work well now but will presumably get better.”

I think that bringing