Climate change sceptics abound, especially on social networking sites like Twitter.
Software developer Nigel Leck quickly tired of refuting anti-science tweets, so he created a chatbot, called AI_AGW, to automatically scan Twitter every five minutes for common phrases associated with arguments put forward by climate change sceptics. The chatbot then sends an automated reply countering the argument, and includes a link to published research supporting its case.
When someone recently tweeted that “First the Earth goes through #GlobalWarming and #GlobalCooling. Its a natural climatic cycle and contributes to natural selection.”, Leck’s chatbot responded “Ancient natural cycles r irrelevant 4 attributing recent global warming 2 humans” and referenced a detailed discussion of the differences between current global warming and natural heat variations.
Technology Review calls it “a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.”
Unfortunately, the chatbot is not able to recognise sarcasm, so when one Twitter user sent out the message “A climate change denier walks outside, ‘it’s cold, global warming is false’. The world is round Bozo. Go to the southern hemisphere”, chatbot responded with “A local cold day has nothing to do with long-term trend of increasing global temperatures” and a link.
Leck says his program includes an algorithm that is supposed to learn such false positive phrases, and it will get more accurate as it responds to more tweets.
Read more at Discover.
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