Experts Warn ‘AI-Written’ Paper Is Latest Spin on Climate Change Denial
AFP/APP
Washington: Climate change deniers are promoting an AI-generated paper that questions human-induced global warming, prompting experts to warn about the rise of flawed research marketed as objective and rigorously logical.
The controversial paper, which rejects climate models linking carbon emissions to global warming, has been widely circulated on social media as the first “peer-reviewed” study led by artificial intelligence (AI) on the topic.
Titled “A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO2–Global Warming Hypothesis,” the paper includes references disputed by the scientific community, according to experts interviewed by AFP.
Researchers in computation and ethics also cautioned against accepting claims of neutrality in papers that list AI as an author.
The study, allegedly written entirely by Elon Musk’s Grok 3 AI, gained online momentum after a blog post by Covid-19 skeptic Robert Malone promoted it, attracting over a million views.
“After the debacle of man-made climate change and the corruption of evidence-based medicine by Big Pharma, the use of AI for government-funded research will become normalized, and standards will be developed for its use in peer-reviewed journals,” Malone wrote.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuel combustion is the primary driver of rising global temperatures and increasingly severe weather disasters.
Illusion of Objectivity
Academics warned that despite the benefits of AI in research, its use can lead to a dangerous illusion of objectivity and insight.
“Large language models do not have the capacity to reason. They are statistical models predicting future words or phrases based on what they have been trained on. This is not research,” said Mark Neff, an environmental sciences professor.
The paper claims Grok 3 “wrote the entire manuscript,” with co-authors providing guidance in its development.
Among the co-authors is astrophysicist Willie Soon, a known climate contrarian who has received over a million dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Disputed works by physicist Hermann Harde and Soon himself were cited in the AI-generated analysis.
Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a scientific integrity expert, noted that the paper failed to detail its creation process: “It includes datasets that formed the basis of the paper, but no prompts,” she said. “We know nothing about how the authors asked the AI to analyze the data.”
Ashwinee Panda, a postdoctoral fellow in AI safety at the University of Maryland, warned that crediting AI as the sole author creates a misleading aura of neutrality.
“Anyone could just claim ‘I didn’t write this, the AI did, so this is unbiased’—without providing evidence,” he stated.
Opaque Review Process
Concerns have also been raised about the journal’s editorial practices. Neither the journal nor its publisher appears to be affiliated with the Committee on Publication Ethics.
The paper acknowledges “careful edits provided by a reviewer and the editor-in-chief,” identified on the website as Harde one of the sources cited in the study.
It does not clarify whether the paper underwent open, single-, or double-blind peer review. Notably, it was submitted and published within just 12 days.
“That an AI would effectively plagiarize nonsense papers” is unsurprising to NASA’s top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, who dismissed the study’s credibility: “This retread has just as little credibility,” he told AFP.
AFP reached out to the paper’s authors for clarification on the peer-review process but received no immediate response.
“The use of AI is just the latest ploy, to make this seem as if it is a new argument, rather than an old, false one,” said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University.
