IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05323238.html

Using generative AI to increase sceptics' engagement with climate science

Author

Listed:
  • Bence Bago

    (Tilburg University [Tilburg] - Netspar)

  • Philippe Muller

    (IRIT - Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - UT2J - Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Toulouse INP - Institut National Polytechnique (Toulouse) - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EPE UT - Université de Toulouse - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - TMBI - Toulouse Mind & Brain Institut - UT2J - Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EPE UT - Université de Toulouse - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse)

  • Jean-François Bonnefon

    (TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

Climate scepticism remains an important barrier to public engagement with accurate climate information, because sceptics often actively avoid information that contains climate science facts. There still lacks a scalable, repeatable intervention to boost sceptics' engagement with climate information. Here we show that generative artificial intelligence can enhance engagement with climate science among sceptical audiences by subtly modifying headlines to reduce anticipated disagreement, regret and negative emotions, without compromising factual integrity. Headlines of climate science articles modified by an open-source large language model led to more bookmarks and more upvotes, and these effects were strongest among the most sceptical participants. Participants who engaged with climate science as a result of this intervention showed a shift in beliefs towards alignment with the scientific consensus. These results show that generative artificial intelligence can alter the information diet sceptics consume and holds promise for advancing public understanding of science when responsibly deployed by well-intentioned actors.

Suggested Citation

  • Bence Bago & Philippe Muller & Jean-François Bonnefon, 2025. "Using generative AI to increase sceptics' engagement with climate science," Post-Print hal-05323238, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05323238
    DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02424-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05323238. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.