The Washington Post Sticking a new climate-based AI chatbot within its homepage, app and articles. The experimental tool, called Climate Answers, will use the outlet's breadth of reporting to answer questions about climate change, the environment, sustainable energy, and more.
Some questions you can ask the chatbot include things like, “Should I get solar panels for my home?” or “Where in the US is sea level rising the fastest?” Like other AI chatbots we've seen, it will then present a summary using the information it's been trained on. In this case, Climate Answers uses articles within. The Washington Post’s climate section – as far back as the section’s launch in 2016 – to answer questions.
Photo: The Washington Post
“We have a lot of innovative and original reporting,” Vineet Khosla, The Washington PostChief Technology Officer said during an interview the edge. “Somewhere in the years and years of data-rich reporting we've done, there's an answer buried in what we've written.”
Below the answer, you'll find links to the articles the chatbot used to craft its answer, along with the relevant snippets it got its information from. The tool is based on a large language model from OpenAI, but The Washington Post Also experimenting with AI models for Mistral and Meta's Llama.
Photo: The Washington Post
Asked about the possibility of misinformation, Khosla said climate answers won't answer questions he doesn't have answers to. “Unlike other answering services, we're really building it into verified journalism,” Khosla said. “If we don't know the answer, I'll say 'I don't know' instead of answering.” However, we plan to try out the tool when it launches today to get a feel for its defenders.
The Washington Post isn't the only news outlet that's relying on its own trove of information to power an AI chatbot. In March, Financial Times Began testing Ask FT, a chatbot that subscribers can use to get answers about topics related to the outlet's reporting. Meanwhile, other publishers, such as News Corp, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, and the edgeOf Parent company, Vox Media, has jumped into a licensing partnership with OpenAI.
The Washington Post is gradually building on its use of AI; According to Khosla, the outlet also offers AI-powered summaries for some of its articles. Although The Washington PostWhile the new chatbot is only capable of asking climate-related questions for now, Khosla did not rule out the possibility of expanding it to other topics covered by the outlet. “We fully expect this experience to expand and scale across everything. The Washington Post It does,” Khosla said.