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This Week in AI — 🌎 How AI helps battle climate change
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This Week in AI — 🌎 How AI helps battle climate change

December 3, 2024 | By: Dave Isaac

Each week we’ll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!

What You Should Know

 

AI Increasingly Used to Help Combat Climate Change

Artificial intelligence has faced criticism for its substantial carbon footprint, but it is also part of the solution to fighting climate change. Tech companies large and small are using AI as a crucial tool to monitor methane-emitting facilities, reduce greenhouse gas emissions at data centers, and even help farmers “supercharge” crop breeding to protect agriculture from climate change.

Using AI to benefit the environment is still in its infancy, though. According to a Harvard Business Review survey, 87% of local leaders say they lack the skills or resources to process data, which is where AI can help. HBR says that a better understanding of this data can help drive smarter decisions like evaluating alternative development options, forecasting potential crisis scenarios, and optimizing maintenance rollouts — all of which can have a positive environmental impact.

For communications professionals, these developments highlight the importance of leveraging AI to craft creative solutions. Taking an AI-first approach can open doors to new strategies that were previously unthinkable, whether the end goal is saving the planet or making communications just a little bit easier. Embedding AI into the problem-solving process can enhance efficiency and impact, no matter what line of business you’re in.

Elsewhere …

Tips and Tricks

✍️ Claude can write like you

What’s happening: One of the draws of using generative AI to produce content is its ability to match a voice or style. That can be cumbersome (and sometimes ineffective) depending on which tool you’re using. Last week, Claude introduced a new way to personalize the style of its outputs. It’s available for both free and paid users.

Why it’s important: The ability to create and edit multiple styles and choose between them is somewhat novel. ChatGPT can adapt to a style based on its “memory” or “custom instructions” capabilities, but that only informs one style. If you work at an agency where you manage multiple clients or even if you work in-house and want to create content based on several execs, the ability to choose from a list of styles is beneficial.

How it works: Upload documents or paste text and Claude will analyze the writing and give you a style summary. You can ask Claude to edit the style either by typing directly in the prompt window or clicking on the buttons that display suggestions. 

After you’ve tailored the style, you can preview how it would look based on a few different types of content, like marketing blog posts, product reviews, or customer emails. However, the topics Claude chooses to write about in the preview seem random, so it might be hard to gauge how well it adheres to your style. You can also click on “Options” and rename the style so it’s not Claude’s brief description.

Be aware: While Claude does a decent job of matching the writing style, you might want to keep a separate style just for social media. Even if you upload a variety of content (blog posts, articles, press releases, and social media posts), it will probably still include hashtags and emojis even if you ask for a different kind of content. 

Quote of the Week

“AI’s performance for gene discovery and mining has shown great promise. Making the final link to then providing information on future breeding that would help cope with climate change is an excellent idea.

“This type of technology – if done correctly – is a step change and would allow for better planning before growing seasons.”

— Dr, Shruti Nath, Climate Scientist at the University of Oxford, to CNN on AI’s use in farming

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