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Does an AI Dream of the Climate Crisis? – A conversation with ChatGPT

woman looking at an android

by Robin Tschötschel

So-called “large language models” — machine learning systems trained on vast amounts of text written by humans — become better and better and are set to take over a wide array of tasks. As researchers, this development is both exciting and worrying, as it will likely have large impacts on knowledge production, teaching, and how we do research.

One of the concerns is that these models either inherit or produce new biases and provide inaccurate information. Especially in politically contested areas, like climate change, this can be a real problem.

There are many ways to evaluate language models, but leading a conversation with it can be quite entertaining and informative. To make the conversation less repetitive, some of the answers have been shortened. Actual questions asked are in italics.

Can you introduce yourself? Continue reading Does an AI Dream of the Climate Crisis? – A conversation with ChatGPT

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How to talk about climate change – a collection of thoughts and helpful input for non-experts

by Fenja De Silva-Schmidt

When did you talk about climate change the last time? And when did you do so with family and friends? Results from our surveys show that on the one hand, the amount of people talking about climate change in their daily lives is rising steadily (see Guenther et al. 2020, in German), but on the other hand, a significant share of people never touch the topic in their conversations. For many, it is a somewhat awkward topic, leading to conversations about guilt and depressing visions for our future.

Rising share of conversations about climate change in daily life, source: Down to Earth data 2015/2019.

rising share of climate change conversations 2015-2019

In this post, I’ll summarize why it is a good idea to talk about climate change, even if you are not a climate expert, and which strategies mostly lead to a constructive conversation. Continue reading How to talk about climate change – a collection of thoughts and helpful input for non-experts