Climate Journalism in an Era of A.I. Slop

In March 2026, I visited my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and gave a talk in the Department of Life Sciences Communication’s science communication colloquium.

I discussed challenges to the climate journalism field, media coverage of extreme weather events and climate risks, including heat waves and the missing link to climate change in reporting on soil health.

I also talked about my DePaul Humanities Center-supported project looking at how leading generative A.I. chatbots, OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, as well as Google Gemini’s Imagen and Nano Banana, depict climate change through their text-to-image models.