Climate change sceptics are promoting an AI-generated paper that questions the role of human activity in global warming — prompting warnings from scientists about the growing use of flawed research presented as objective and rigorous.
The paper, titled "A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO2–Global Warming Hypothesis," disputes established climate models and has been widely shared on social media as the first “peer-reviewed” study led by artificial intelligence on the subject.
However, experts told AFP that many of the paper’s references are contested within the scientific community and contradict established climate science.
Computational and ethics researchers also cautioned against claims of neutrality in papers that use AI as an author.
The new study — which claims to be entirely written by Elon Musk's Grok 3 AI — has gained traction online, with a blog post by COVID-19 contrarian Robert Malone promoting it gathering more than a million views.
"After the debacle of man-made climate change and the corruption of evidence-based medicine by big pharma, the use of AI for government-funded research will become normalised, and standards will be developed for its use in peer-reviewed journals," Malone wrote.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus linking fossil fuel combustion to rising global temperatures and increasingly severe weather disasters.
Academics have warned that the surge of AI in research, despite potential benefits, risks triggering an illusion of objectivity and insight in scientific research.
"Large language models do not have the capacity to reason. They are statistical models predicting future words or phrases based on what they have been trained on. This is not research," argued Mark Neff, an environmental sciences professor.
The paper says Grok 3 "wrote the entire manuscript," with input from co-authors who "played a crucial role in guiding its development."
Among the co-authors was astrophysicist Willie Soon — a climate contrarian known to have received more than a million dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry over the years.
Scientifically contested papers by physicist Hermann Harde and Soon himself were used as references for the AI's analysis.
Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, who tracks scientific malpractice, remarked the paper did not describe how it was written: "It includes datasets that formed the basis of the paper, but no prompts," she noted. "We know nothing about how the authors asked the AI to analyse the data."
Ashwinee Panda, a postdoctoral fellow on AI safety at the University of Maryland, said the claim that Grok 3 wrote the paper created a veneer of objectivity that was unverifiable.
"Anyone could just claim 'I didn't write this, the AI did, so this is unbiased' without evidence," he said.
Neither the journal nor its publisher — which seems to publish only one journal — appear to be members of the Committee of Publication Ethics.
The paper acknowledges "the careful edits provided by a reviewer and the editor-in-chief," identified on its website as Harde.
It does not specify whether it underwent open, single-, or double-blind review and was submitted and published within just 12 days.
"That an AI would effectively plagiarise nonsense papers" does not come as a surprise to Nasa's top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, but "this retread has just as little credibility," he told AFP.
AFP reached out to the authors of the paper for further comment on the review process, but did not receive an immediate response.
"The use of AI is just the latest ploy, to make this seem as if it is a new argument, rather than an old, false one," Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, told AFP.