Chatbots favor the status quo in climate advice, Waterloo study finds

When weighing climate policy trade-offs, large language models were on average 7.5 times more likely to recommend staying the course than doing something new, whether or not the status quo was the climate-friendly choice, according to a University of Waterloo-led study published Oct. 7 in Environmental Research Communications. The researchers ran 7,548 queries on car purchases, home heating, recipes and policy trade-offs through at least six models each, 54,888 prompts in all. About 21% of home heating recommendations were heat pumps, and recommendations of electric vehicles stayed below real-world adoption rates in almost every region, Waterloo researcher Seth Wynes told Anthropocene Magazine.