Artificial intelligence is often associated with digital deception, but a team of Australian and British researchers are trying to flip the script by using AI to counter climate misinformation.
Their riposte started with the development of an AI model that can track large volumes of false or misleading climate claims on social media. To teach the AI model how to do that, the researchers went straight to the source — some of the biggest traffickers of climate misinformation.
“The data that we originally trained it with came from climate denial blogs and conservative think tanks,” said John Cook, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne who co-developed the AI model.
Cook and his colleagues cataloged their efforts in a 2021 paper published by the journal Nature, and since then the team has been trying to improve the AI model with an eye on an even bigger prize: a new tool that can quickly deflate climate misinformation.
