AI chatbots and the battle for information
From the controversy surrounding scientific papers written by AI powered chatbots and their contributions to carbon emissions, to the greater role of AI in providing climate solutions including accurate and timely information, is AI a force for good or evil when talking about the climate?
When in January 2023 the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an editorial on the threat posed by tools such as ChatGPT for transparent science, they brought into the limelight an issue that had been brewing for months: how to distinguish between the work of bots and that of scientists and what to do about it?
Perhaps the most significant outcome of the initial debate — which we discussed in detail in “Bot or scientist? The controversial use of ChatGPT in science”, giving our own summary of the role of AI generated language models in the future of scientific research and communication — was how “publishers of thousands of scientific journals — including the same Science — have banned or restricted contributors’ use of an advanced AI-driven chatbot amid concerns that it could pepper academic literature with flawed and even fabricated research,” effectively ensuring that chatbots could not be considered authors of scientific papers, at least for now.
Since then, the issue of AI chatbots generating unreliable, and potentially misleading, information has continued to grow, leaving the realm of academia and entering the realm of everyday search for accurate information on the internet. So, how does ChatGPT fair when it comes to answering basic questions on climate change?
In our interview, CMCC President Antonio Navarra calls attention to the fact that “ChatGPT’s tendency to provide an answer regardless of whether it is accurate or not seems to win over the restraint of providing correct information.”
According to climate scientist Dr. Ilissa Ocko, who explores the issue in detail in her own interview with ChatGPT, “ChatGPT was largely correct in broad strokes but not in details — and it made serious errors of omission that reflect a larger societal misunderstanding of climate change.”
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