Building a chatbot to help save the world from climate change

I hope this post lands in the right category.

I work at Ørsted the world leader in offshore wind and World’s most sustainable energy company 4 years straight. These accolades are only stated to underline, the honesty behind my intentions in writing here. I’m writing this as a human trying to use whatever agency I have, in helping secure a future for my children and civilization as a whole.

One of the biggest challenges the world faces in the fight against climate change is misinformation. This is a result of a deliberate campaign to sow confusion by the fossil fuel industry.

From my interactions with ChatGPT it’s clear LLM, trained on the most recent data, and presented with transparency of purpose and origin, can be a critical tool in combatting this information. Both by providing credible answers and debunking myths and by empowering advocates with the ammunition they need to influence their communities and politicians.

I have found models on here, that seem to relate to the topic, but my technical skills don’t cut it to explore them.

I’m looking for anyone willing to help me explore the possibilities in LLM.
Agian, I’m not writing on behalf of my company, but out of personal interest and desire to act. Should anything materialize I am in a position to present this further up the chain and potentially put the weight of the company and the green energy industry behind such a project.

I know this is a somewhat random call to action in a forum, but I sincerely hope this post captures the attention of other concerned humans.

tl:dr: Looking for help in creating a LLM that can fight misinformation about climate change.

Thank you

Jonathan

1 Like

Welcome @JonathanLang! This is really interesting, and I’m sure there are people in the community who would like to collaborate with you on something like this. We’ve recently created a channel over on the Discord server (Hugging Face) for discussing anything ethics-related, and this would be a really cool thing to bring up in there! If you join us over there and post about this, you might find some peers to work with, and I can rustle up some resources to help you get started.

@NimaBoscarino You can also share resources that would be helpful to other users having the same problem here, as the Discord is great for instant communication but not so great for future searches :slight_smile:

Sure! It’s a bit complicated without some more information about the kind of experience that you’re envisioning, @JonathanLang – could you share a little bit more? Maybe some examples of how a user would interact with it? Depending on that, there are lots of different considerations for how you could build something like this.

For example, you could explore creating some pre-formatted prompt templates (GitHub - f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts: This repo includes ChatGPT prompt curation to use ChatGPT better.) that could be designed to encourage ChatGPT (or some other chat-interfaced LLM) to explain climate change-related concepts in simple language without jargon.

It’s important to note that ChatGPT has issues with hallucinating citations (Information Literacy and Generating Fake Citations and Abstracts With ChatGPT – OUseful.Info, the blog…) so it might be worth exploring methods that can avoid those issues, e.g. maybe by using a knowledge base?

There’s a really interesting article by Shah & Bender (2022) which might help you shape what you might want your project to look like.

1 Like

Thank you for the post. A remarkable effort.
Being someone who is working closely with the ai services experts, I wish to extend my helping hand for your noble effort. Feel free to reply or DM me in the forum.
Even though I am not a field expert, let’s see whether I can be a helping hand.