\n<\/p>\n
There\u2019s arguably no face, voice or collection of exuberant, patterned shirts more recognisable than those belonging to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.<\/p>\n
The bespectacled boffin has been answering curly listener questions about science, with characteristic excitement and passion, for more than 40 years. Despite a seemingly tireless work ethic, Kruszelnicki, now 77 years old, can\u2019t be everywhere all at once.<\/p>\n
Those questions now come in waves, across social media platforms at all hours of the day. \u201cSometimes I get 300 requests a day on Twitter to answer an involved question about climate change,\u201d Kruszelnicki says.<\/p>\n
Particularly on X (formerly Twitter), he says he would often engage with users who don\u2019t believe climate change is real or urgent. He hoped there might be a way to change the minds of this group of people, who he says have been bombarded by misinformation in places such as the Murdoch press for the past 30 years.<\/p>\n
After speaking with longtime friend and technology journalist Leigh Stark, the pair settled on an idea: an AI-powered Digital Dr Karl. Using a large language model (LLM), they\u2019re creating a chatbot designed to <\/strong>sound like Kruszelnicki that provides users with evidence, backed by trustworthy sources, that the climate crisis is caused by humans and is an urgent problem to solve.<\/p>\n \u201cI cannot answer all the questions by myself and people want questions answered. The only way I can do it is develop this digital AI,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Kruszelnicki\u2019s achievements as a science communicator are unparalleled: in Australia he\u2019s considered a National Living Treasure, he won the Unesco Kalinga prize, he wrote dozens of books and is the one and only Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney, a position he has held since 1993.<\/p>\n He believes AI can help convince those who don\u2019t believe in the severity and causes of the climate crisis \u2013 even if there are outstanding questions around the ethical use of AI, its training data, accuracy and its own environmental impacts. \u201cI think with climate change, we are at a stage where the perfect is the enemy of the good,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly not going to become unethical or become like the forces of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n Digital Dr Karl runs on an open-source LLM developed by Mistral, a French company considered one of Europe\u2019s challengers to OpenAI and Google.<\/p>\n To create Digital Dr Karl, Stark has taken Mistral\u2019s base model, then trained it on a corpus of Kruszelnicki\u2019s climate science resources acquired through his own research for his own books and writing on climate. It includes academic papers, consensus statements and original articles from publications including the New York Times, the Guardian and RenewEconomy to build out its knowledge, just like the real Kruszelnicki has.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an AI that\u2019s been trained on the 40,000 PDFs I\u2019ve gathered over the last 40 years,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Stark says questions over copyright are valid, and he would like to ultimately have the chatbot trained exclusively on data, but says \u201cwe\u2019re not at that point yet\u201d, emphasising \u201cthis is beta, this is really early stuff\u201d and the intent is to build something \u201cbased solely on data\u201d.<\/p>\n Taking the Guardian through a demonstration of Digital Dr Karl, Stark reveals the AI interface is similar to ChatGPT, and users can type in a single query about climate change to kickstart a conversation.<\/p>\n Stark types in \u201cclimate change is a hoax\u201d and the Digital Dr Karl replies a few seconds later in a stilted and tonally inconsistent recreation of Kruszelnicki\u2019s voice. It wants to know if we are suggesting climate change \u201cis a fabricated idea\u201d. We are only able to answer yes or no. We respond yes, at which point the AI quotes Barack Obama on the effects of climate change.<\/p>\n As the conversation continues, Digital Dr Karl displays data, such as graphs showing atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 170 years. But it also seems to mix metaphors and \u201challucinate\u201d (the terminology used in AI research for \u201cmake up\u201d) some of the numbers for atmospheric carbon dioxide rise.<\/p>\n Stark describes the AI as both an \u201calpha\u201d and \u201cbeta\u201d version, and he is working to improve the AI voice, but expects Digital Dr Karl will release this in October. Kruszelnicki says he has already spent $20,000 of his own money since February to develop the AI: \u201cThis is purely philanthropic \u2013 I do this because I see this as my duty, in return for 16 years of free university education that I received.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Five Great Reads<\/span><\/p>\n Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Kruszelnicki plans to run his digital self for 100 days because \u201cit\u2019s a nice round number\u201d. He will also deliver 100 TikToks, one a day, alongside the project and each one will push people to his Digital Dr Karl, Stark says. After 100 days, the pair will switch off their AI and \u201cwork out what the fuck just happened\u201d. At that juncture they will do a survey with the hope that the result is that \u201cmore people are open-minded and believe in climate change\u201d, says Stark.<\/p>\n Kruszelnicki says they\u2019re just \u201ctrying to do the Mark 1\u201d and will see what they find before deciding whether they go on to a Mark 2.<\/p>\n There are some hints about what could <\/em>happen. Mounting evidence \u2013 academic and anecdotal \u2013 suggests LLMs can influence emotion, opinion and belief.<\/p>\n In September 2024, a study in the journal Science showed conversations with a chatbot could reduce participants\u2019 belief in their chosen conspiracy theory, including everything from the Kennedy assassination to the illuminati, by around 20% on average. The effect persisted for two months after the conversations took place.<\/p>\n Thomas Costello, assistant professor of psychology at American University and lead author of the Science study, says <\/em>the AI is persuasive because it can rapidly access and strategically deploy information in conversation. \u201cThe back and forth is useful because [reasoned] dialogue and debate is excellent at surfacing the crux of disagreements and kicking the tyres of each side,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Costello has also co-authored another study, yet to be peer-reviewed but available online, suggesting a similar effect is seen when AI models, tailored to respond to specific concerns from a user, address climate scepticism and inaction. One of the key elements though, is that these AI agents are not based on any real person, and to shape belief, users must be willing to engage in conversation.<\/p>\n But even if Digital Dr Karl can change minds, it contains the same outstanding issues as other LLMs. Kruszelnicki and Stark hope to alleviate the concerns around AI\u2019s environmental impacts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll run the website entirely off solar panels and you don\u2019t need a lot of energy,\u201d says Kruszelnicki.<\/p>\n Stark says Digital Dr Karl is running off a very small amount of computer memory on a $12,000 Mac and it theoretically can run on renewables. \u201cIf we can get several of these computers running off of a solar battery or basically solar panel and a large battery, then we can effectively run this on renewables.\u201d However, with more users, Stark says scaling it could be a challenge \u2013 he expects up to 2,500 people will be accessing Digital Dr Karl at any time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to be keeping an eye on it, on every response that it makes,\u201d Kruszelnicki says. \u201cAnd if it goes bad, we\u2019ll pull the plug.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s arguably no face, voice or collection of exuberant, patterned shirts more recognisable than those belonging to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. The bespectacled boffin has been answering curly listener questions about science, with characteristic excitement and passion, for more than 40 years. Despite a seemingly tireless work ethic, Kruszelnicki, now 77 years old, can\u2019t be everywhere<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[1564,270,2394,186,254,1025,1443,4501,437,8685],"class_list":{"0":"post-15094","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-artificial","9":"tag-change","10":"tag-chatbot","11":"tag-climate","12":"tag-give","13":"tag-hes","14":"tag-intelligence","15":"tag-karl","16":"tag-minds","17":"tag-sceptics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Putting Digital Dr Karl to the test<\/h2>\n