Building an AI is difficult. Trying to encapsulate the one of Australia’s top science educators in one anyone can access, doubly so. And yet that’s what we’re trying. Because it matters.
It sounds like something out of “Black Mirror”, but I’ve been tasked with something that’s seemingly impossible, or at the very least improbable: how do you capture the essence of someone and store it in a machine?
AI is the answer. In fairness, it’s not the answer for everything, even if mainstream news might paint it so. But it’s the answer for this project: creating a virtual version of one of Australia’s leading proponents of climate science to convince people who don’t believe that not only is it happening, but they need to realise it immediately.
In short, we’re creating a recreation of a chat with Dr Karl.
Yes, that Dr Karl.
He’s written nearly 50 books and has been one of the country’s leading science educators for years and years. Many Australians — this one included — grew up listening to his takes on science on radio and watching on TV, and his love and adoration for explaining the complexities of science in easier ways has helped shaped many of us.
In recent years, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has even seen scammers use AI versions of him to take advantage of others, selling fake products under his name, alongside other famous Australians.
But this year, he’s planning to put AI to good use, and this journalist is a part. Instead of merely writing about AI, this journalist is building a digital Dr Karl to help explain climate science to people struggling with the idea that it’s real.
The problem
It’s 2025 and hot in autumn, and yet people still struggle with the idea that climate change is real.
The summers are getting hotter with forest fires becoming the norm, excessive rains are flooding places, and parts of Australia (and the world) where people live are becoming uninsurable due to what are clear climate-related problems.
There are scores and scores of data available on climate change, ranging from increases of ocean temperature to increases in carbon dioxide, and yet despite every bit of evidence pointing to climate change, many struggle with the idea that it’s a thing that’s happening. The ability to stave off climate disaster is slowed and questioned, even as other areas of science and technology are not.
Experts are shouting it from the roof tops and all manner of social networks, and books are being written and published, heaps of them for both. Evidence to climate change is literally staring people in the face, but for some, the science of convenience prevents them from seeing it.
Simply put, some people don’t believe because of something inconvenient preventing them from seeing the science is legit. It could be the cost of climate change being too much to repair and affecting them in other ways, it could be political, or it could be something touted by someone viewed as an expert who is motivated in some other way.
The inconvenience of a solution could be preventing people from seeing that climate change is a very real problem in need of fixing.
And that’s something Dr Karl has been looking to solve with AI.
The concept
These days, AI is everywhere. It’s in your phones and your computers and it’s even in kitchens and vacuum cleaners now, as well. AI can be found, and some of it for good reason.
It’s an assistant; it can help. It’s not meant to replace every aspect of your life, but thanks to AI’s ability to learn steps and repeat them, or even act as an agent on your behalf, it can cut the time needed to do one process, having a computer do it for you.
And it can even act as a voice.
Celebrity experts such as Dr Karl are known for having people ask questions, but you can’t just call then up and shoot the breeze about climate science, or anything else for that matter.
So we’ve started turning his understanding of climate science into an AI that anyone can talk to.
Building something that matters
And in a rare example, rather than simply reporting the news, this journalist is building something with Dr Karl for others to use worthy of being news itself.
Why me? It might be because I’ve been helping answer Dr Karl’s questions about technology for a number of years now, and had started building AI-led solutions in the past year. Some have made their way into Pickr, while others are still works in progress.
But for the past few months, I’ve been working alongside regular Pickr activities (not to mention a day job) to craft a custom AI solution that understands climate science like Dr Karl and can talk to people the way he might, explaining ideas and providing an approach that hopefully changes minds.
As part of an AI talk at the University of Sydney’s Seymour Centre on May 27, Dr Karl even showed a preview of what it looks like, and what we’re planning to do: change people.
The result aims to be something anyone can chat to for a scientific exploration of climate change in regular terms, with the hope that it will run on renewables to do so. It’s no use running a climate change project in a way that can adversely affect the climate, and this differs greatly from most AI projects, given artificial intelligence-based apps tend to need more power than most communities draw on.
The process
To do this, I’m building a digital version of Karl by taking in all of his sources (and then some), and converting them to a model the AI can use.
This isn’t just a version of ChatGPT, but something custom, designed to take in climate change theories and provide reasoning to them. It’s the closest I can get to making a digital equivalent of Dr Karl, and one that will (hopefully by the end of the project) even sound like him, too.
The goal will be an AI that anyone can use to discuss climate change built by a scientist and a journalist with the hopes that it changes the planet one conversation at a time.
It’s a work in progress right now, but hopefully soon will be something more people will be able to try out, talking to a digital version of Dr Karl to explain what’s going on with the climate.
