Twitter Bot Auto-Debates Climate Change Critics

As anyone interested in the recent U.S. midterm elections can attest, arguing with people who'll never agree with you is an exhausting hobby.

At least one developer has found a way to answer his would-be debaters without having to engage in a tiring, dead-end debate himself.

When it comes to climate change, many people find themselves at odds with certain facts to the point of disputing the validity of said facts.

The developer in question (that would be Australian systems architect and entrepreneur Nigel Leck) got tired of arguing on Twitter with people who believe climate change is not occurring, so he built a bot that scrapes Twitter for certain strings of words and then responds to the author of the offending tweet with a pre-packaged link containing a science-based counter-argument.

The dialog (or should we say rhetoric?) between climate change skeptics and those in the opposite camp is apparently so formulaic that Leck's bot can carry on an exchange with a real human for dozens of tweets. He hopes to make the auto-debate even more realistic and accurate in the future by parsing data from other climate change debaters on Twitter.

Named "Turing Test" (after computer scientist Alan Turing's famous criteria for machine intelligence), the bot can be found on Twitter at @AI_AGW.

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