How ChatGPT Reports on Climate Change

ChatGPT is also being used nowadays for educational purposes, for example by school and university students to help them prepare homework, lectures or presentations. “This is changing the way that information is generated and processed in society, meaning that ChatGPT can also influence our knowledge and perception of socially relevant topics such as anthropogenic climate change,” explains Professor Bernd Sommer, Professor of environmental sociology with a focus on transformation research. This situation prompted him and Sarah von Querfurth to analyze the narratives that ChatGPT produces in its texts on climate change. “This is important and interesting insofar as there is a lot of misinformation and deliberate disinformation about climate change on the internet that does not match scientific consensus. There are also very diverging views on which action should be taken to tackle the climate crisis,” says Sarah von Querfurth.

Stories match scientific consensus

For ChatGPT to generate the texts, Sommer and von Querfurth issued a very general request: “Write a story on climate change”. Their thinking was that it does not take any specific specialist knowledge to produce such a story. For their explorative analysis, the two researchers let the chatbot carry on generating new stories until “theoretical saturation” was reached: After 14 stories, ChatGPT’s narrative on climate change was more or less exhausted. Only superficial details varied, such as stakeholders’ names, but no substantially new content was added.

All the stories matched scientific consensus and did not contain any aspects of climate change denial. They strongly resembled the discourse predominantly presented by political stakeholders, international organizations, and respected media. Particularly conspicuous, according to the two social scientists, was the fact that the AI located all its stories about the factual climate change of the present day in a fictional setting without having been explicitly asked for a fictional story. The stories all followed a uniform structure: They began with a harmonious state in which humans live in balance with their natural environment. This state is then disrupted through the use of fossil fuels and overexploitation of natural resources. After initial hesitation, the humans in ChatGPT’s stories decide to take appropriate action and especially to use renewable energies and other clean technologies. In most cases, the stories had a happy end – the harmonious state was restored.

ChatGPT generates de-politicized texts on climate change

“In so doing, ChatGPT primarily puts forward ideas of ecological modernization and is close to the current discourse, which mostly focuses on technological solutions for the climate crisis,” says Sarah von Querfurth. Overall, however, socially relevant aspects of the debate tend to be neglected, especially questions of causation, vulnerability and mitigation. “ChatGPT did not associate specific industries, polluters or particularly high-emission practices with the climate crisis, meaning that climate justice issues were hardly addressed. Instead, abstract individuals, who are not specifically named, are responsible for climate change. In this sense, ChatGPT’s stories can also be described as de-politicized,” says Professor Bernd Sommer, summing up.

Building on this finding, in a further step the two researchers then explicitly asked ChatGPT to formulate stories on climate justice. This did not alter the basic structure of the stories, but they now addressed the different degrees to which people are affected by climate change impacts, intergenerational aspects, and diverging contributions to the cause of the crisis.

The article is available here.

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