Montreal-made website uses AI to depict impacts of climate change anywhere in the world
Global News
The website can apply filters showing the impacts of flooding, wildfires or smog to any address available through Google Street View.
Imagine Parliament Hill blanketed in orange skies, floodwaters climbing the sides of BC Place stadium or a thick layer of smog fogging the view of Halifax from Citadel Hill.
These are all scenes depicted on a website published Thursday that blends artificial intelligence with geography to show the potential impact of climate change on almost any address on the planet.
The website, thisclimatedoesnotexist.com, was created by Mila, a machine-learning and technology research institute in Quebec founded by Yoshua Benigo, one of the godfathers of AI.
The website can apply filters showing the impacts of flooding, wildfires or smog to any address available through Google Street View and is meant to raises awareness about future scenarios that could arise if the world’s response to climate change continues to fall short.
Victor Schmidt, a lead researcher on the project, said the site is not meant to predict climate change, but rather, it strives to make the issue more personal for people who can’t visualize something that is seemingly far off or something that could impact another community sooner than theirs.
“Just because it may not happen to them, doesn’t mean it won’t happen to other people elsewhere or sometime in the future,” Schmidt said.
To boost empathy, the website prompts people to search their current or childhood home, workplaces, favourite restaurants and travel destinations.
The images the website will return are built around generative adversarial networks, or GANs, a class of machine-learning frameworks designed by Mila that allow a computer to create and transform images.