March 3, 2023
Can Artificial Intelligence Help Cool the Planet?
By Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
To some activists, ChatGPT seems like a useful tool for the climate movement. But skeptics warn that the benefits are outweighed by the costs—including misinformation and increased emissions.
By Ilana Cohen
Between the political and technological hurdles to achieving a global energy transition, the climate crisis can often feel deeply overwhelming. But articulating a solution to what is arguably the greatest potential catastrophe humanity has ever faced is no problem for ChatGPT—or at least, so the chatbot makes it seem.
ChatGPT has the potential to disrupt and transform industries from computer science to media, and has quickly infiltrated college campuses, where students have taken advantage of its various uses to complete assignments. As of January, the platform reached roughly 100 million active users in record time. Released free of charge to the public late last year as part of a testing phase, the chatbot comes from OpenAI, a California-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company in which Microsoft is a major investor. The chatbot is designed to provide human-like responses to a wide range of queries. Now, Google is hoping to piggyback on Microsoft’s success as it prepares to publicly release its own AI chatbot, Bard.
In the past few years, the relationship between AI and the climate crisis has become a growing area of focus both within climate science itself, including for climate modeling, and for climate activists at groups like Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace, which have targeted Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for providing Big Oil companies with AI tools. How exactly AI chatbots could shape the climate sphere remains to be seen, but based on the release of ChatGPT, AI experts and climate activists already have a few ideas—and many concerns.
