Artificial intelligence predicts impact of climate change on the world

A artificial intelligence is a set of technologies responsible for several changes, especially in quality of life, measurements and simulations. Weather applications, digital assistants, among many others are examples of the use of artificial intelligence — or “IA” — and recently a Canadian organization brought to the world an AI that could exemplify the impact of climate change in diverse locations familiar to users, using an artificial intelligence technology called GAN - “Generative Adversarial Networks” (“opponent generative networks”, in free translation).

Present through the program "This Climate Does Not Exist” (“This climate does not exist”, in free translation), the GAN artificial intelligence produces images showing different cases of natural disasters in areas around the planet, selected using the system Google Maps, in order to exemplify how natural disasters can change the cities and environments we are used to visiting.

“This Climate Does Not Exist”: What is it?

O This Climate Does Not Exist is a website created by scientists at the artificial intelligence den in Quebec, Canada, which uses GANs to transform images, demonstrating an idea of ​​what a series of places – which can be chosen by anyone who accesses – would look like after natural catastrophes. . At the moment, only environments with floods, fires and smog (a layer of polluting gases formed by their accumulation in the part of the atmosphere where we live).

The name of the site comes, according to the creators, to emphasize the fact that climate change and global warming are, in fact, real, scientifically proven problems. In addition to being a website accessible to everyone where anyone can choose a location and test it to see how it would look under the effect of natural disasters, it is also an information tool about climate change and global warming. While some of the drastic climate change options are still a bit limited — AIs are improving little by little, after all — it's still a didactic, useful and interesting tool to use.

How does GAN artificial intelligence work?

Artificial intelligence GAN is a structural class of machine learning algorithm (study of algorithms that automatically improve as used) developed in 2014, whose main objective employed is generate and transform images that little by little will improve their results and assimilate themselves better to objects, animals and even people in a way that looks more like what human beings see. The more artificial intelligence is exposed to content, the more it resembles real content.

GAN artificial intelligence was used on the website This Climate Does Not Exist to simulate the visual effects of floods, fire e smog using images provided by Google Maps through the Google Street View, which photographs and catalogs different locations worldwide. By applying GAN artificial intelligence technology to modify images and the vast amount of images from different Google locations, images are generated simulating natural disasters in locations chosen by users.

But how to use this tool and what does it have to do with the impact of climate change?

Using the tool is simple: Just access the site and use the tool "View climate change” (“view climate change”, in free translation), where the site will ask for a location on the map shown on the left side. You can type the address you want in the bar on the right side of the map, and a list of locations will be presented — just like it works in Google Maps, since the site uses the tool to demonstrate its results. After that, just click on the “Launch the visualization” and choose what type of natural disaster you prefer to see simulated from among the three options provided.

The images shown by the site serve as a didactic (and even a little scary) way of demonstrating how places that are close to us could suffer from climate change caused by global warming. The whole intention is to show that, even if it is not visible in your neighborhood, this type of catastrophe can happen if precautions are not taken about reducing fossil fuel emissions, and it serves to remind you - even through texts in the website — that global warming is still a very big problem to be tackled.

See also:

listen to Showmecast #65 on climate change, global warming and COP26, available at the link below:

Pig iron: ThisClimateDoesNotExist, Mila e Accenture.