This AI chatbot will answer all your climate change questions
Washington Post funnels climate change reporting through new conversational AI tool
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
A new AIchatbotcan help you understand climate change and how it’s causing a global crisis.The Washington Posthas introducedClimate Answers, which is designed to respond to your questions directly using the newspaper’s climate journalism.
The AI draws from the publication’s extensive archive on the subject to compose its response in everyday language, along with links to the pieces it is using as sources.
“The rise of chat interfaces powered by generative AI got us thinking: How could we offer an experience that leaned into the expertise and high-quality reporting produced by The Washington Post?“Washington Postchief technology officer Vineet Khosla explained in a blogpost. “This experiment leverages artificial intelligence to help our users discover and explore our authoritative climate reporting.”
Climate Answers turns to articles published by theWashington PostClimate & Environment and Weather sections since 2016 to respond to queries. The AI has some strict guardrails on it to prevent hallucinations or misinformation. If the tool doesn’t surface any useful articles to use as sources for an answer, it will just say it can’t answer rather than provide an incorrect or irrelevant answer.
Interactive AI Journalism
Accurate and accessible climate information is increasingly crucial. The effects of climate change are impossible to ignore for anyone paying a slight bit of attention, but greater awareness of what’s happening and how to combat it are crucial to actually mitigating the deadly future we all face. Utilizing AI to streamline access to climate reporting is a useful way for the Washington Post to contribute. That said, while the paper didn’t cite the specific AI models involved, some of them are quite high in energy costs, lending some irony to the project.
Khosla pitches Climate Answers as a way to personalize reader experiences and tailor how they absorb the paper’s reporting to their preferences. The idea is to make the Washington Post’s journalism more interactive and accessible through conversational AI. Khosla said he hopes this specific project will deepen the public’s understanding of climate issues.
Climate Answers is a major step in theWashington Post’slarger plans for integrating AI into its operations as part of its “Build It” program. The newspaper has already introduced AI-written article summaries in some cases and employs a synthetic voice created by AI to read newsletters out loud.
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
You Might Also Like
Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He’s since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he’s continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.
ChatGPT coded a game for me in seconds and I am simply astounded – and coders should be very worried
Top 3 things you have to try with the new ChatGPT search
Your doctor may have an AI assistant taking notes during your next Zoom call