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A weaponized AI chatbot is flooding city councils with climate misinformation
Internal instructions accessed by Canada’s National Observer show that the chatbot produces tailored scripts, petitions, reports and even speeches for council chambers. The messaging is all framed to resonate with municipal officials’ duty to represent local interests. The chatbot drops the cost of misinformation to "close to zero."
KICLEI (‘Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives’) was founded in 2023 by Freedom Convoy activist Maggie Hope Braun with a singular aim: to convince towns and cities to quit the voluntary net-zero program Partners for Climate Protection, due to its ties to the UN through its co-organizer, ICLEI Canada. The chatbot’s instructions tell it to “de-emphasize the climate catastrophe narrative,” to focus on “practical environmental protection measures” and “real pollution, not CO2.” The bot is told to frame these arguments in the most reasonable possible way, “emphasizing collaboration” and “encouraging diplomacy and mutual understanding between citizens and elected officials.” The same KICLEI report cites Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, to claim that “water vapour is far more influential [than CO2] in regulating global temperatures.”
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