A Philly artist created a climate news AI bot. The result is ‘a little sassy’

This story is part of the WHYY News Climate Desk, bringing you news and solutions for our changing region.

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While some scientists say a generally warming atmosphere likely contributed to the severity of the Los Angeles wildfires, some politicians — like Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson speaking on NPR last week — say evidence of human-caused climate change is “corrupted science.”

But what does artificial intelligence say?

Philadelphia artist Sarah Kaizar has created an AI-generated climate news aggregate column, AT Feed, which scrapes highlights of current climate-related reporting and then asks ChatGPT to automatically blend them into a roughly 600-word round-up.

AT Feed appears biweekly on TheArtBlog, a website of Philadelphia arts news and reviews.

“It’s a little sassy,” Kaizar said. “I do ask it to write something of a satirical post, but even the satire is not very far off from the current headlines. There’s not much spin on it.”

The mashups can include everything from the COP29 international climate summit, to greenhouse gas emissions from a thawing tundra, to glowing underwater sea slugs and packs of orcas bullying whale sharks.

How much of that is legitimate news, and how much is insignificant fluff? Kaizar allows her bot to indulge in algorithmic absurdity.

“I described it as in the camp of political cartooning,” Kaizar said. “A lot of stories are very click-baity, which is part of the questions I have for the project: What are we reading? What are we getting out of this information? The AI stories are that mishmash of me throwing my hands up.”

More climate-related news is flooding the internet, but how people receive and interpret that reporting is an open question. Research has shown that simply reporting data tracking the causes and effects of global climate change does not necessarily mean people will believe it.

A 2024 study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that 59% of Americans believe climate change is caused by human activity, and 29% believe it is caused by naturally occurring climate cycles.

However, only 21% of those surveyed were aware that the overwhelming majority of scientists (90%) see climate change as human-caused.

In an internet environment where all news is flattened into algorithms, the AT Feed puts things like Australian crocodiles needing a PR boost and the high price of coffee, on the same playing field as African countries negotiating debt-for-nature financial recoveries and teenagers winning a lawsuit in Montana Superior Court for their constitutional right to a clean environment.

“One person’s understanding of the world seems to be built from whatever algorithm they’re being fed,” Kaizar said. “I understand us to be people who are very easily influenced and manipulated. The information that you get shapes your worldview.”

Kaizar set up RSS feeds from major news sites, such as BBC, NPR, FOX News, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and the Guardian. Every two weeks she puts articles from that feed into ChatGPT and asks it to generate a single article. Kaizar then posts ChatGPT verbatim, not altering its AI-generated text.

She asks ChatGPT to generate 20 headlines for the article, from which she selects one. She also asks the AI bot to generate an image, which she uses as the basis for her own illustration to accompany the article. Kaizar is a graphic designer by profession, having formerly worked for WHYY and is now on staff at the Philadelphia architectural firm KiernanTimberlake.

The AT Feed postings include an estimate for how much carbon dioxide was generated to run ChatGPT and create the column. Each column produces the CO2 equivalent of driving roughly 30 miles in a car, a vast majority of that coming from the art supplies used to make the illustration.

Before AT Feed, Kaizar had created a set of detailed prints depicting endangered species of plants and animals, some of which are made more vulnerable due to climate change. That set was displayed at the Michener Museum in Doylestown and is now touring museums nationally.

When she approached TheArtBlog with the idea of AT Feed, Kaizar admitted that the idea was half-baked. She was not sure what to make of her AI bot.

The founding director of TheArtBlog, Roberta Fallon, was OK with that. She sees AT Feed as an online art project masquerading as listicle journalism.

“I see this in the long history of activist art,” Fallon said. “It’s critical of the way the news media is serving up discussion – or, less discussion than just bullet points about what was going on with climate change, and how that is leaving us with absurd levels of not understanding.”

Kaizar said she is figuring out what AT Feed is on the fly. She is committed to posting every two weeks, likely for a year.

At the very least, it is cathartic.

“Instead of going to happy hour with your friends and just being, like: ‘What is the world right now?!’, it’s a space to put these feelings and thoughts and anxieties into something,” she said. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s productive, but it’s an outlet.”