The details, courtesy of Good:
Debating climate change can get exhausting, especially when so much of the science is settled. So Nigel Leck, a software developer, created a Twitter chatbot, AI_AGW, to do it for him.
Every five minutes, AI_AGW searches Twitter for tweets that feature common, debunked arguments against man-made climate change. It then responds with its own Tweet, countering the faulty argument in question, and providing a link to published information from groups like NASA that backs up its case.
When someone recently tweeted that “First the Earth goes through #GlobalWarming and #GlobalCooling. Its a natural climatic cycle and contributes to natural selection.” Leck’s chatbot responded “Ancient natural cycles r irrelevant 4 attributing recent global warming 2 humans” and referenced a detailed discussion of the differences between current global warming and natural heat variations.
Sounds entertaining, though I doubt it’ll have much effect on the sceptics (what the hell does?). More fundamentally, I have a few hesitations about bots doing auto-responses to what people say on Twitter – no-one minds when it’s just the climate trolls getting spammed, but how would you feel if every time you tweeted about, say, UK politics, your @ replies filled up with fluff from the political parties?
