What We’re Up Against: Fully Automated Climate Change Denial

On his Substack The Climate Brink, the climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University — a recipient of NCSE’s Friend of the Planet award — speculated that Grok 3, a chatbot operated by Elon Musk’s xAI company, “was specifically programmed to give [a] ‘both sides’ response” when asked whether climate change is an urgent threat. In contrast, earlier versions of Grok, as well as chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini, echo the scientific consensus on climate change. Reporting on Dessler’s investigation, E&E News remarked, “But don’t just take Dessler’s word for it. Grok acknowledged the change when asked by an E&E News reporter about the shift in tone.” (xAI, however, declined to comment.) “As we go into the future, more and more people are going to get their information from these AIs,” Dessler told E&E News. “Obviously, the concern is that someone’s going to do something like this to mislead people.”