Twitter Chatbot Counters Anti-Global Warming Tweets

This statistic will make any environmentalist cringe: 41 percent of Americans think the science on global warming has been exaggerated. That's been caused in part by fake controversies like the so-called "Climategate." What's worse, of the 20 Republican candidates that contested Senate seats, 19 disputed the science behind climate change.

But one software developer is trying to stop people from spreading misinformation about global warming on Twitter. Nigel Leck created the Twitter account @AI_AGW, also known as Turing Test to automatically reply to tweets that contain set phrases associated with global warming skepticism.

Here's how it works. Say you send out a message like the one below:

The @AI_AGW twitter account, in turn, will reply something like the response below:

The problem is that the the AI_AGW Twitter account doesn't always work as it is supposed to. Because it is a chatbot program that automatically replies to a set of canned phrases, it doesn't know how to pick up sarcasm or know when the tweet is using one of those key phrases to reject the global warming deniers' logic.

One Twitter user sent out the message below.

You can probably tell that this user was actually mocking the logic of global warming deniers. But because it contained the phrase "climate change denier," it elicited this response from AI_AGW:

Leck says his program includes an algorithm that is supposed to learn such false positive phrases, and it will get more accurate as it response to more tweets.

The phrase "climate change denier" is one of hundreds that Leck's creation scans Twitter for. His account's responses are drawn from an extensive database of countering phrases with links to more accurate information on global warming.

Leck used to write the responses himself, but he now extracts many of them from a university source he refused to identify.

Since global warming is such a serious problem that is already killing huge numbers of oysters and making summer even hotter around the world, it's good to see someone is putting a stop to the misinformation on Twitter.

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