The Washington Post created an AI chatbot for weather questions

The Washington Post is pasting a new weather-focused AI chatbot within your homepage, app and articles. The experimental tool, called Climate responseswill use the vehicle’s range of reports to answer questions about climate change, the environment, sustainable energy and more.

Some of the questions you can ask the chatbot include things like: “Should I buy solar panels for my home?” or “Where in the US is sea level rising the fastest?” Just like the other AI chatbots we’ve seen, it will present a summary using the information it was trained on. In this case, Climate Answers uses the articles within The Washington Postclimate section of the program – since the section’s launch in 2016 – to answer questions.

“We have a lot of innovative and original reporting,” Vineet Khosla, The Washington Postthe company’s technology director, said during an interview with On the edge. “At some point over the years and years of data-rich reporting we’ve done, there’s an answer buried in one of the things we’ve written.”

Below the response, you will find links to the articles the chatbot used to produce its response, along with the relevant excerpt from which it extracted the information. The tool is based on a great language model from OpenAI, but The Washington Post is also experimenting with AI models of Mistral and Meta’s Llama.

When asked about the possibility of misinformation, Khosla said Climate Answers will not produce an answer to questions for which it does not have answers. “Unlike other response services, we are actually building this into verified journalism,” Khosla said. “If we don’t know the answer, I’d rather say ‘I don’t know’ than invent an answer.” However, we plan to test the tool when it launches today to get a sense of its protections.

The Washington Post is not the only media outlet that relies on its information archive to feed an AI chatbot. In March, the Financial Times began testing Ask FT, a chatbot that subscribers can use to get answers on topics related to the outlet’s reporting. Meanwhile, other publishers such as News Corp, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith and On the edgein Parent company Vox Media has entered into licensing partnerships with OpenAI.

The Washington Post has been gradually based on the use of AI; According to Khosla, the outlet also released AI-based summaries for some of his articles. Although The Washington PostAlthough the company’s new chatbot is only capable of answering climate-related questions, Khosla did not rule out the possibility of expanding it to other topics covered by the vehicle. “We absolutely hope this experiment extends and expands to everything The Washington Post does,” Khosla said.