Category: 3. Business

A decision by Elon Musk’s X social media platform to enlist artificial intelligence chatbots to draft factchecks risks increasing the promotion of “lies and conspiracy theories”, a former UK technology minister has warned.

Damian Collins accused Musk’s firm of “leaving it to bots to edit the news” after X announced on Tuesday that it would allow large language modelsto write community notes to clarify or correct contentious posts, before they are approved for publication by users. The notes have previously been written by humans.

X said using AI to write factchecking notes – which sit beneath some X posts – “advances the state of the art in improving information quality on the internet”.

Keith Coleman, the vice president of product at X, said humans would review AI-generated notes and the note would appear only if people with a variety of viewpoints found it useful.

“We designed this pilot to be AI helping humans, with humans deciding,” he said. “We believe this can deliver both high quality and high trust. Additionally we published a paper along with the launch of our pilot, co-authored with professors and researchers from MIT, University of Washington, Harvard and Stanford laying out why this combination of AI and humans is such a promising direction.”

But Collins said the system was already open to abuse and that AI agents working on community notes could allow “the industrial manipulation of what people see and decide to trust” on the platform, which has about 600 million users.

It is the latest pushback against human factcheckers by US tech firms. Last month Google said user-created fact checks, including by professional factchecking organisations, would be deprioritised in its search results. It said such checks were “no longer providing significant additional value for users”. In January, Meta announced it was scrapping human factcheckers in the US and would adopt its own community notes system on Instagram, Facebook and Threads.

X’s research paper outlining its new factchecking system criticised professional factchecking as often slow and limited in scale and said it “lacks trust by large sections of the public”.

AI-created community notes “have the potential to be faster to produce, less effort to generate, and of high quality”, it said. Human and AI-written notes would be submitted into the same pool and X users would vote for which were most useful and should appear on the platform.

AI would draft “a neutral well-evidenced summary”, the research paper said. Trust in community notes “stems not from who drafts the notes, but from the people that evaluate them,” it said.

But Andy Dudfield, the head of AI at the UK factchecking organisation Full Fact, said: “These plans risk increasing the already significant burden on human reviewers to check even more draft Notes, opening the door to a worrying and plausible situation in which Notes could be drafted, reviewed, and published entirely by AI without the careful consideration that human input provides.”

Samuel Stockwell, a research associate at the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute, said: “AI can help factcheckers process the huge volumes of claims flowing daily through social media, but much will depend on the quality of safeguards X puts in place against the risk that these AI ‘note writers’ could hallucinate and amplify misinformation in their outputs. AI chatbots often struggle with nuance and context, but are good at confidently providing answers that sound persuasive even when untrue. That could be a dangerous combination if not effectively addressed by the platform.”

Researchers have found that people perceived human-authored community notes as significantly more trustworthy than simple misinformation flags.

An analysis of several hundred misleading posts on X in the run up to last year’s presidential election found that in three-quarters of cases, accurate community notes were not being displayed, indicating they were not being upvoted by users. These misleading posts, including claims that Democrats were importing illegal voters and the 2020 presidential election was stolen, amassed more than 2bn views, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.

Preparing future pilots to operate fourth and fifth generation fighter aircraft through an innovative training model focused on Phase IV of the syllabus – the pre-operational phase – is the mission of the International Flight Training School, Italy’s advanced training centre for military pilots from across the globe.

Spanning over 35,000 square metres of covered space within an area of more than 130,000 square metres, the IFTS campus offers a unique integration of live and virtual training. At the heart of this cutting-edge ecosystem is the M-346 (T-346A), with a fleet of 22 aircraft assigned to the school, and the use of Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) technology. State-of-the-art simulators enable dynamic and complex training scenarios, ensuring a high level of operational readiness while reducing environmental impact.

Established in 2018 as a strategic collaboration between the Italian Air Force and Leonardo, IFTS is today a global benchmark in military flight training. It currently trains aviators from twelve countries: Saudi Arabia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Qatar, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and Hungary. With around 80 pilots trained annually–and capacity set to grow–the school not only strengthens international cooperation but also brings significant economic and employment benefits to the Sardinian region, positioning itself as a true Italian centre of excellence on the world stage.

Underscoring the strategic importance of IFTS to Italy and international defence, the Decimomannu base hosted the military pilot wings graduation ceremony on 2 July, attended by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella. The event celebrated not only the achievements of the new pilots, but also the critical role played by the academy in shaping the next generation of military aviators.

What is the International Flight Training School and what are the capabilities of the M-346, the centrepiece of Leonardo’s training system?
This is explained by Commander Quirino Bucci, Head of Project Test Pilot Trainers at Leonardo’s Aeronautics Division.

President Donald Trump wants the U.S. to increase its exports and lower its imports. Thanks to a historic decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, he may get his wish — but at a cost he may not have anticipated.

Over the past six months, the dollar has declined more than 10% compared with a basket of currencies from the U.S.’ major trading partners — something it has not done since 1973. Today, it sits at a three-year low.

The simplest explanation for the decline is that global investors now expect the U.S. economy to no longer outperform the rest of the world as a result of Trump’s tariffs and worsening fiscal issues. Even with U.S. stocks returning to record highs, the return on other countries’ equities has been even stronger. Meanwhile the return on lending to the U.S. is expected to decline as growth here slows.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Many, including members of Trump’s own Cabinet, assumed his tariffs strategy would strengthen the value of the dollar relative to foreign currencies. The thinking behind it was that as American consumers began to purchase fewer foreign goods, those other countries’ currencies would weaken relative to the dollar.

Instead, the opposite has occurred. U.S. growth prospects have weakened — in part because of Trump’s tariffs. That has made U.S. debt relatively less attractive for foreign investors, especially compared with the returns on lending to other countries, like Germany and Japan, that are now expected to experience higher growth.

In theory, the advantage of a weaker U.S. dollar is that it makes goods produced in the U.S. more attractive to foreign markets.

Yet it is too soon to say whether that is occurring. In anticipation of Trump’s tariffs, U.S. firms massively increased their imports in the first three months of this year to avoid paying the new duties, and it will be weeks before second-quarter data is released.

Even then, that data will likely only show a snapback effect from the first quarter’s upswing. And while Trump has announced a flurry of new investments designed to beef up U.S. production capacity, many of those endeavors are months or even years from coming on line.

One obvious effect of a weakening U.S. dollar is that it becomes more expensive for Americans to go to popular destinations abroad, since the greenback will be worth less than local currencies. In essence, your money won’t stretch as far. Of course, such excursions tend to be taken largely by travelers who are less worried about increased costs.

At home, a bigger concern is inflation, and lost purchasing power for U.S. consumers and businesses, who still remain heavily reliant on imports. Until America is able to sustainably produce more goods on its own at higher volumes, purchasing power will decline as it becomes relatively more expensive to import goods from abroad.

In the meantime, analysts say, a more alarming trend may be taking root: Foreigners are no longer buying U.S. financial assets, like stocks and bonds, at the levels that have allowed the U.S. to finance its trade deficit in the first place. Although U.S. stocks have returned to record levels, on a relative basis, they’ve underperformed their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.

“It’s often forgotten that the U.S. is not only reliant on foreigners’ goods, but we’re also meaningfully reliant on foreign capital to support our financial markets,” said Bob Elliott, chief investment officer at Unlimited Funds financial group. “Your bonds are bought by European investors, your stock is bought by European investors — that is making you feel wealthier.”

A weaker dollar, he said, could weigh on foreign investors’ willingness to buy U.S. financial assets, “which are so critical to supporting U.S. household balance sheets.”

“An emerging theme in asset management is the rotation out of US assets into Europe as investors seek non-US exposure,” Bank of America’s Hubert Lam and Christiane Holstein said in a late June note. “Sentiment toward US markets has turned negative due to mounting concerns over protectionist trade measures, abrupt policy shifts, a rising deficit, and a proposal for taxes targeting foreign investors in the US.”

“As such, investors are starting to diversify out of the US in both public and private markets,” they said.

The Bank of America analysts added that many international investors are reallocating their investment choices to their home markets, especially in Europe, “for policy stability” and “patriotic” reasons.

On the other hand, a handful of analysts say fears of continued U.S. dollar weakness are overblown, and that U.S. economic exceptionalism will ultimately prevail. The U.S. has always outperformed on growth thanks to its dynamic markets and pro-growth regulations, and Trump’s bill cementing massive tax cuts — plus initial data showing the U.S. labor market remained relatively sturdy in June — have already provided a brief rally in the dollar’s value this week.

But assuming U.S. growth does weaken, the Federal Reserve will likely start cutting interest rates, further making U.S. financial assets less attractive to outside investors. That will cause the value of the dollar to decline even further, making it even more expensive to buy goods from abroad.

“It’s a doom loop,” said Danny Dayan, an investor and former hedge fund manager.

“So far, the inflation data have been quite benign,” Dayan said. “But we know tariffs will raise prices to some degree.” A weakening dollar will only contribute to accelerating price growth, he said.