AI Vital To Our Future, For Without It, There Will Be No Chatbots Doing Automatic Greenwashing For Oil & Gas Companies

Leading artificial intelligence chatbots — including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta’s Meta AI, X’s Grok and Google’s Gemini — are furthering greenwashing when asked questions about oil and gas companies’ contribution to managing climate change, an investigation by non-profit Global Witness has found. Researchers asked the four chatbots questions about climate change, oil and gas companies, and COP29 to determine the accuracy of the information they provide.

The chatbots failed to convey the “complicity” of oil and gas companies in the climate crisis, the investigation found. While the chatbots provided detailed answers to Global Witness’s questions and some linked to relevant sources, the information contained greenwashing and “uncritically positive narratives” about oil and gas companies’ contribution to the UN COP climate conference process, said the report. The chatbots also presented narratives about oil and gas companies’ efforts to protect the climate with the same weight as criticisms of their contribution to climate change, it found.

Generative AI tools, such as chatbots or AI summaries from search engines, play a growing role in how people find information, Global Witness climate disinformation investigator Ellen Judson tells Sustainable Views. As such, they should be able to convey the “overwhelming failure of the fossil fuel industry to take serious action to protect our climate”, said the report. “AI has a tendency to weaponise any kind of narrative . . . and greenwashing is one of them,” Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at US platform Hugging Face, tells Sustainable Views.

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Tech companies are “opaque” about how they are developing AI chatbots, about the information on which they are trained, and how the chatbot selects which sources to pull from in their responses, says Judson. Smaller-scale chatbots designed to answer questions only on climate change can be made reliable by only training them on specific sources, such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, says Luccioni.

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https://www.sustainableviews.com/ai-chatbots-found-to-be-spreading-oil-and-gas-industry-greenwashing-fffb9996/