A new AI chatbot can help you understand climate change and how it’s creating a global crisis. The Washington Post has introduced Climate Answerswhich is designed to respond directly to your questions, using the newspaper’s climate journalism.
The AI draws on the extensive archive of publications on the topic to compose its response in everyday language, along with links to the pieces it uses as sources.
“The rise of chat interfaces powered by generative AI got us thinking: How could we deliver an experience that matches The Washington Post’s expertise and high-quality reporting?” Washington Post Chief Technology Officer Vineet Khosla explained in a blog after“This experiment uses artificial intelligence to help our users discover and explore our authoritative climate reporting.”
Climate Answers focuses on articles published by the Washington Post Climate & Environment and Weather sections since 2016 to respond to questions. The AI has a number of strict safeguards to prevent hallucinations or misinformation. If the tool does not bring up any useful articles to use as sources for an answer, it will simply say that it cannot answer rather than giving an incorrect or irrelevant answer.
Interactive AI journalism
Accurate and accessible climate information is becoming increasingly important. 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 mitigate the deadly future we all face. Using AI to streamline access to climate reporting is a useful way for the Washington Post to contribute. That said, while the article didn’t cite the specific AI models involved, some of them are quite expensive to power, making the project ironic.
Khosla pitches Climate Answers as a way to personalize readers’ experiences and tailor the way they consume the newspaper’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 particular project will deepen the public’s understanding of climate issues.
Climate Answers is an important step in the Washington Post’s larger plans to integrate AI into its operations as part of its “Build It” program. The newspaper has already introduced AI-written article summaries in some cases and uses a synthetic voice created by AI to read newsletters aloud.