A new AI chatbot can help you understand climate change and how it's causing a global crisis. The Washington Post has introduced Climate Answers, which is designed to answer your questions directly using the newspaper's climate journalism.
The AI draws on the publication's extensive archive on the topic to compose its response in everyday language, along with links to the pieces it uses as sources.
“The rise of generative AI-powered chat interfaces got us thinking: How could we deliver an experience that built on the expertise and high-quality reporting produced by The Washington Post?” Washington Post Vineet Khosla, chief technology officer, explained in a blog post: “This experiment leverages artificial intelligence to help our users discover and explore our trusted climate reports.”
Climate Answers draws on articles published by Washington Post The Climate & Environment and Weather sections have been used since 2016 to answer queries. The AI has some strict safeguards in place to prevent hallucinations or misinformation. If the tool does not display any useful articles that can be used as a source for an answer, it will simply say that it cannot answer rather than providing an incorrect or irrelevant answer.
Interactive journalism with artificial intelligence
Accurate and accessible climate information is increasingly crucial. The effects of climate change are impossible to ignore for anyone paying even a little attention, but greater awareness of what’s happening and how to combat it is crucial to truly mitigating the deadly future we all face. Using AI to streamline access to climate reporting is one useful way for the Washington Post to contribute. That said, while the paper didn’t cite the specific AI models involved, some of them have fairly high energy costs, lending a certain irony to the project.
Khosla is pitching Climate Answers as a way to personalize readers’ experiences and tailor the way they absorb the paper’s articles to their preferences. The idea is to make Washington Post journalism more interactive and accessible through conversational artificial intelligence. Khosla said he hopes this specific project will deepen the public’s understanding of climate issues.
Climate Answers is an important step in the From the Washington Post The paper already has broader plans to integrate AI into its operations as part of its “Build It” programme. The paper has already introduced AI-written article summaries in some cases and employs an AI-created synthetic voice to read newsletters aloud.
