The Biggest Questions About AI
The map · 5 Humanity · 5.1 Truth, information, and democracy · 5.1.2

Shared reality

Can journalism, science, courts, universities, and government preserve trusted procedures for establishing facts?

Epistemic security reframes truth decay as an infrastructure problem — the institutions that certify facts need defending the way power grids do, not the way individual claims do.

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What changed
November 2025–August 2026 · swept August 3, 2026 · editorial review pending
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The most encouraging news for shared epistemic procedures came from crowd fact-checking: a real deployment study and an independent seven-month evaluation both found AI-written Community Notes earning cross-partisan 'helpful' ratings at roughly double the human rate — evidence AI can strengthen, not only erode, collective fact-finding. Institutions are also building working defenses, from Wikipedia's AI-cleanup guides to updated epistemic-security frameworks.

Recent thinking
4 featured from 5 tracked · November 2025–August 2026 · all 5 chronologically →
Haiwen Li & Michiel A. Bakker · arXiv (MIT) · Apr 2026 paper
AI Fact-Checking in the Wild: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Written Community Notes on X
LLM notes receive more positive ratings than human notes across raters with different political viewpoints, suggesting the potential for LLM-written notes to achieve the cross-partisan consensus.

A real deployment study of LLM-written Community Notes finding they outperform human notes across partisan lines — evidence AI can strengthen, not just erode, crowd-based fact-certifying procedures.

Spence Purnell · R Street Institute · 16 Jun 2026 report
AI Writers on Community Notes: An Evaluation of Seven Months of Data
AI notes achieved a VSR of 88.8 percent compared to 68.5 percent for human-written notes (chi-squared P < 0.001).

Independent seven-month evaluation of X's AI Note Writers pilot showing AI notes reach 'helpful' status at double the human rate — converging with the MIT field study on AI augmenting community fact-checking at scale.

Elizabeth Seger · TechPolicy.Press · 12 Feb 2026 essay
Why Crisis Resilience Depends on Epistemic Security
When these systems are robust, they support collective decision-making under pressure. When they fail, crises do not merely become harder to manage; they accelerate and spiral.

An author of the canonical Turing epistemic-security report updates the infrastructure frame for the AI era, naming AI-enabled manipulation among seven priority interventions.

Russell Brandom · TechCrunch · 20 Nov 2025 news
The best guide to spotting AI writing comes from Wikipedia
habits and turns of phrase that are rare on Wikipedia but common on the internet at large

Documents Wikipedia's 'Project AI Cleanup' and its Signs of AI Writing guide — an epistemic institution building working procedures to defend itself against AI slop.

Additional relevant discussion (1)
AI-generated evidence is a threat to public trust in the courts — Heaton, Cleary & Navin · National Center for State Courts · 24 Feb 2026
Foundational reading (2)Epistemic Security in a Technologically-Advanced WorldSeger et al., Alan Turing Institute · 2020We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation Is Not an AI Problem.Kapoor & Narayanan, Knight First Amendment Institute · 2024
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